Partners
by Demyrie
Summary: TFA. Lockdown offered him selfish solace in exchange for his values. What if Prowl had said yes? A piecemeal look at Prowl and Lockdown's inter-galactic life in all its odd, sweet and dangerous moments. LockdownxProwl. 'What-If' sequel to 'Deadlocked'.
1. Foil

A/N: To all those who read Deadlocked (thank you!), I'm sure you're just as curious as I was about the unspoken possibility: what if Prowl had said yes to Lockdown?

Hmmmm. Lots of sex, that's what XD No, rilly. I LOVE how these two play off each other. Too much, even?

This is a collection of short stories and impressions of what Prowl and Lockdown's bounty-hunting-super-happy-extravaganza-team existence would entail, ranging from oddly sentimental to even MOAR-ODDISH domestic to dark-dark-dark. So… enjoy the subject-hopping and I sincerely hope that Lockdown is still… Lockdown. Because I would hurt myself if I did anything bad to so glorious a character.

Prowl, stop disapproving: Lockdown could be my sugar-mech-daddy any day :D

(And I'm so flattered by the interest in my TFA Dystopia! I promise you, there will be more on that: my mind is munching on it as we speak. I can't give you an epic story, but I can give memoirs and sucker-punching fragments!)

These go in… general chronological order, with a few exceptions. SO JUST READ.

Warnings: Sexual conduct/references and some gore.

-.-.-.-.-.-

Foil

-.-.-.-.-.-

It was a partnership in every sense.

There was give and take, compromise, cooperation and simple coexistence. Considering their standards and motivations, it was surprising how well the two mechs meshed, but both were chiefly concerned with a single concept: success. If Lockdown expected Prowl's flashy, vicious side to bloom when given the proper skuzzy habitat and a stimulating lack of morals, he was only half appeased. The former Autobot was Lockdown's partner in most senses, but remained his foil in every other sense.

Lockdown enjoyed the sound of his own vocals. Prowl was silent, only speaking when necessary.

When he did speak, it still pleased the other mech on a girder-deep level (even after so many stellar-cycles of it) that Prowl booted up his fluid vocals in the middle of a hostage situation just to verbally peg him in the ankle, or the knee. The comments were nothing spiteful: it was playful, to rile his partner up.

Prowl _played_, when that wicked, prideful Spark of his got a little out of control. His sharp little grins were an event in and of themselves, even if they vanished too soon after. Lockdown enjoyed the flare-ups: he liked to see the pretty gaps in Prowl's shell and self-command, and the result of it. The motion to rile him up. It was… satisfying.

The ninjabot was a practical but connection-motivated creature. He only spoke to those he business with, or some emotional connection to: in sum, Lockdown, or Hits that had truly made him angry. Otherwise, contrary to the hunter's hopes, the motivation for exhibitionist banter simply wasn't there, and their missions were conducted with one-sided banter and stern looks. Perhaps had the circumstances been more relaxed, he might speak more, but there was an internal tension in him that refused to leave. His partner knew nothing of tension.

Lockdown had an unlimited comfort-zone. He did what he wanted, where he wanted.

Prowl was of the same cast. He just didn't… want so much.

Prowl was still unbearably reserved, but stellar-cycles together made personal distance impossible: Lockdown _knew_ the kid, and he never got bored of Prowl. He became irritated, impatient and confused upon the odd occasion, but never bored. There was too much to look for; too much to look _at_. Even if Prowl had been as hideous as, say, himself—by so-pristine Cybertronian standards that simply didn't matter in lawless, culture-neutral deep space where 'society' devolved into blind worship of powerful, ruthless and well-connected people, no matter how ugly—Lockdown's interest would have remained untouched due to all the well-greased machinations going on behind that blank visor of his, colored with different levels of pride, biting wit, observation and, best of all, viciousness.

It was a viciousness as quiet as Lockdown's was loud.

Prowl had a penchant for the quieter tasks on the ship. Especially during dry spells, he ran diagnostics and simply explored the space as it went by, zooming in on this rock here, or that final-stage red dwarf star there. He was a computer whiz for tracking and flexible programming, much like how he recalibrated Lockdown's ship to seek the Allspark shard signal on Starscream so, so long ago. Lockdown was more than glad to leave the position of monitor duty to someone else (running the entire insentient ship himself was a chore, and he would much rather be sorting through possible Hits or customizing mods), but seeing Prowl motionless for megacycles, simply _looking_, made him shake his head and want to go hammer something until it cracked.

Prowl observed. Lockdown effected. Unyielding measure; relished excess.

Though missions were a thrilling, stimulant-riddled thing to enjoy, there were times in the beginning that Lockdown doubted Prowl's ability to be controlled. Surely, as he'd seen (and felt and paid for and installed himself in the form of a new vocal processor), the self-sufficient ninjabot didn't take orders well, and traditional 'control' wasn't an option. Besides, Lockdown was not a _leader_: he was an individual with power and advantage who demanded submission, but wasn't possessed of any selfless, guiding urges. He only dealt with equals who could take care of themselves, because he wasn't going to soften blows or go back for bodies. Still, he wanted Prowl to… follow his lead, at the least.

Despite the opportunity for rebellion, however, there had been little to no problem. The tactics Lockdown chose for nearly every mission—all based on individual attacks and a natural flow of conflict with a basic (and loose) goal—were Prowl's own tactics. They trusted each other's skills, and the fights played out cleanly, blow to instinctual blow, because of that respect and Prowl's own respect for the bounty hunter's innate dominance. Their attack styles complimented each other, worked together but always remained separate.

It wasn't _control_ so much as a steady flow of opportune concurrences… but either way, Prowl was still his partner after seventeen stellar-cycles of it. More than that, the kid seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself.

Lockdown certainly was.


	2. Closed Door Policy

A/N: Sorry for the… explanatory tone in most of this. I worked very hard on refining their motivations and basic interactions—perhaps too hard?

Love this idea. Love the play of their 'respect' for one another, and Lockdown's WANT for attention.

PS: I totally give credit to the entertaining Misya for Lockdown's inherent distrust of sentient ships. It was an idea that refused to leave me, and I love it dearly, but I also stole it from her idea-cradle. I AM A CRADLE-ROBBA. Now go read her fics.

-.-.-.-.-.-

Closed Door Policy

-.-.-.-.-.-

Occasionally, the chill void of space annoyed him.

He'd been running this game for as long as he cared to recount, surviving eons planet-hopping, but some slow solar-cycles found him cagey and irritated at utterly basic aspects of his existence: space, for one. The fact that it was black, or cold. Or endless.

Then, there was his tiny, tiny ship.

Perhaps it had to do with a dry spell. He literally had little else to do but sit around and re-specialize modifications when no one wanted someone dead enough to pay an exorbitant price for it. His grinding good mood _always_ deflated when a hunt went wrong, but he could hardly use that as an excuse anymore: his success rate, previously stellar without Prowl, had reached untold heights with the ninjabot. They were knockouts.

The kid was getting a reputation for himself as a kind of shadow-creature, and Lockdown had become nothing short of legend in the whisper-filled alleyways of planets. Still, legend or no, he wasn't immune to what humans call 'cabin fever'. Much like Prowl, he liked being in control of his environment. When that environment began to annoy and trap him, he had nowhere to turn--and brutally limited space to walk it off.

To begin the restless ritual, he paced in his vista. Located at the front of the ship in a red-tinted enclosure, it gave him a near panoramic view of anything outside: mostly, space. Cold space. Too much space; too much vista. He moved on.

Various distractions were in order. He might check an item or two on the black market, waiting for bidding to start… in seventy-three Cybertronian mega-cycles. Next, he would reorganize his modifications and trophy-racks. Occasionally, he might even call Swindle, who became unprofessionally irate after the first few wooly, silence-blotted exchanges: even more so once he realized Lockdown was calling _just to call_.

"Creator, just go jump his circuits already!"

"Shove it up your pipe, Swindle."

"Take my frequency off your speed-seek, guy: I am not a hotline, and these cycles aren't free."

Having a companion had made him weak in some respects, because his hard-edged, self-assured solitary streak had dissolved in the ebb and flow of Prowl's company: before able to survive for untold cycles with no sentient (or at least, intelligent) contact, the bounty hunter had tasted _interaction_ and found it to his liking… regardless if he didn't give a crankshaft about most people he came across. Still, there was something to be said for having someone to talk to, even if one didn't particularly value their life, and maybe that's what led him to such… unsatisfied behavior.

Lockdown, as a rule, was always satisfied. Even if he wasn't, he had always had the _means_ to satisfy himself: all because of self-reliance and a solitary life. Now, it was different. As the mech's array of distractions fell through one by one, his stir-crazy patterns always led him storming in the same direction: Prowl's hallway room. His ship was truly compact for such a grand life, fit with only the barest of necessities, but it was amazing how well he could avoid that hallway when he wanted to. Now, he stood in the middle of it, clenching various parts of his eclectic anatomy.

The door was closed.

It was always closed: it was Prowl's 'special place'. Of course they were partners, but they were still individuals. Each required his own space, but while Lockdown's chamber was of little importance (always messy but never lived in: a functional and detached place for recharging) because his 'territory' was technically the entire ship and he lived wherever he damn well pleased, Prowl's small Zen hotbox was his ultimate retreat. He spent a lot of time in there.

A lot.

It sincerely perturbed Lockdown to find himself alone on such a small ship. To have Prowl just disappear from his airless living space—leaving no trace of his life like Lockdown did, like the mods thrown here or the tools there, organized but thoroughly _utilized_—was unnerving, and made him want to go and drag the ghostly mech out of his hole. They should have been knocking into each other at every junction, trading looks and simply coexisting, but Prowl utterly vanished when not in Lockdown's sight or his lap.

He was all for hobbies, but Lockdown sincerely had no patience for 'Zen': especially when it made his ship echo.

So, contact-starved and dissatisfied, he waited for the kid to come out. With anyone else in such 'understood living conditions', he would have walked up and demanded it, but Prowl had his respect. Prowl was _meditating_. Prowl didn't want to be disturbed, and the door proved it. No, Lockdown would not rap on the door, or call out, or even comm him in jest, because he would expect the same closed-door respect in return, double-edged blade as it was now.

Where respect held, however, manipulation was always close in line. Lockdown knew the sensory-sensitive ninjabot couldn't concentrate when he was lurking outside. He attributed it to his scent and his intentions: Prowl delicately claimed the sound of Lockdown's foreign-tech compressors set him on edge. So he purposefully ground his teeth and stomped down the dark hallway just loud enough and, through all of these mature exertions, spoiled Prowl's solitude so that the ninjabot had no other choice _but_ to let him in and… well. His partner never seemed to complain: he became exasperated, but never complained, and Lockdown was not above a little scheming to get what he wanted.

'Hideously determined' and 'firmly unprincipled' sounded so much better than 'manipulative', in his humble opinion.

After a good amount of innocuous noises, the dingy hatch door opened with a slow, reluctant wheeze. Capitulation. But, harmless as it was, the occurrence was a growing mystery to Lockdown, as Prowl was never nearby to do it; then again, the room was always dark, and Prowl was quick as light.

Lockdown breathed in before he entered, looking guardedly into the darkness with his one hand on the doorframe.

The door shut behind him, cutting away the ghost-lighting of the hallway and sealing him in. The first time may have startled him, but he knew better than to call out, even in the intense darkness. The game was familiar to him: perfected and condensed, now, into a ritual. Prowl liked rituals, and Lockdown liked Prowl. Simple.

He waited, mouth twitching into an anticipatory smile. Already, though he hadn't laid optics on his partner, his hackles were settling.

The room was perfectly quiet and still. Then, out of the dark, like the product of some internal glitch, his leg buckled. He flinched, whipping toward the thick nothingness closest to his limb, but did nothing more, ignorant as he was of Prowl's furniture arrangement. The invisible, obstacle-riddled room was new territory that Prowl knew like the back of his servo, and much like a trap… but one set in goodwill.

A few more silent cycles passed and a flicker of pain went up his arm, followed by a rushing neural numbness. He jerked, then allowed himself to settle into a battle-ready crouch.

Something brushed against his hip: Lockdown struck out to his left and met nothing but empty space. The mech growled, glaring around with a clenched servo and waiting for the next attack.

As part of his training, Prowl knew all the pressure-construction points of a 'bot's exostructure. His strikes were soundless and precise and his retreats were instantaneous, leaving Lockdown nothing to grab. Occasionally he would indulge in a more teasing touch, but that was only to bring the game to another level: and only when he allowed it. At first, it was only strike and retreat, to lure the bounty hunter out.

Lockdown's patience—or his ability to _abide_ without responding in kind—was short. The moment Prowl smacked the next few pressure points, prompting an irritating gush of numbness or feedback, Lockdown instantly clawed out, swinging at the spot where the attack originated. No matter how quick or true his blows, however, the air nullified them. Cold and still, empty of satisfaction or a target. Prowl was one with the darkness, and the darkness was pissing him off.

Frustration was an issue. Most mechs left some sort of physical energy signal or optic-luminance. Not Prowl. Lockdown might as well have been alone in a slaggin' _tiny_ room with himself and a bucketful of system glitches, and that _irritated_ him, but still the game continued.

Itching pain. Strike. Numbness, a slight stagger—strike.

Again and again, Prowl teased him and withdrew, the hunter's firm fist whipping through empty space until he began to feel inept or duped, like he was stumbling while standing still. He was losing his edge, losing control. The bounds of the room yawned outward until they formed an abyss, where he was tortured by darting beings with no substance: Prowl carefully led him around in the cramped dark in order to disorient him. The ninjabot was a master of physical deception, always aware of everything around him, most particularly since Lockdown was in _his_ realm now.

It was all part of the game--but because it was his game, Prowl knew when to end it.

Just as Lockdown was entering the point of anger and debilitating frustration—torn between calling the scuffle off and truly making a move to end the playfulness of it—Prowl surfaced from the dark, presence suddenly cold and still in front of Lockdown's chest. He bloomed into existence as a physical barrier, sucking all the momentum out of the taut bounty hunter, visor now glowing a dirty teal.

After the rush of the blows he just fired off into the unknown dark, the concentrated, confrontational stillness stunned Lockdown and brought his sense of reality crashing back. Prowl's factual blue-lit presence—compact and clean-scented—flooded his sensors. Inches lay between them as the two _pressed_ without touching, the smaller mech aspirating quietly as he waited.

Prowl was incredibly attuned to him: as close as Lockdown watched him, he always had the impression Prowl was watching _him_ yet closer. Lockdown had become a science to him, and he _always_ knew when to end the game.

"Yes, partner?" Prowl asked softly.

Even his calm vocals sounded close enough to grab. Vibrant, physical. The older mech tried to sort out his systems and sensory input.

"Thought I'd… check on you."

The claim was unfocused and empty; Prowl waited for more. Lockdown looked around the treacherous darkness, finally growling:

"You spend a Pit of a lot of time in here, kid."

"I like my quiet… quiet," he offered, visor thinning marginally. Lockdown caught the jibe and leaned into the Autobot's space as he regained his mental footing, velvet ease growing. Before a shock, Prowl's proximity speedily stirred another eager facet of his system: the one concerned with the kid's body and the way it handled.

"Aren't you gonna thank me for leavin' you alone all day?" He asked, vocals dipping to lower, rumbling ranges. Prowl smelled like clean air and wax; Lockdown could feel his partner's chassis vibrating ever-so-slightly, which made something clench, sweet and quick, in his thick substructure.

"Hardly," Prowl snorted. "Self-restraint is not your forte."

Before the bounty hunter could wickedly point out that he had been _invited_ in, Prowl's invisible servo touched his hip, fingers dragging along the lip of his pelvic plating and _prying_ slightly. The older mech's reaction was instantaneous: it was the only butterfly touch allowed before Lockdown seized him and forced him into a wall (any wall, still dark) without mercy. Prowl's hard legs captured his middle, squeezing like a counter-attack, but Lockdown was too involved in breaking the myth of him and getting back at the Autobot for the trivial torture, half afraid he would dart into the dark again if Lockdown didn't capture and _crush_ him. It was the thrill of the hunt, with Lockdown relishing the sheer physicality of their sharp-edged scuffle after being stranded in an abyss.

He had focus, had purpose, had tools, and few things were more arousing than being able to exert them all at will. Plus, he had a very, very nice and willing model to exert them with. Lockdown laughed as Prowl's servo sought the front of his dark chest-plating, fingers working silkily at the pulsating seams while his teeth did something meticulous and _unimaginable_ to Lockdown's exposed neck wires. Pleasure coursed through the hunter's thick body, and he thrust Prowl further against the wall until every mismatched inch of him was wedged up against the pretty slicker, servo cupped under his aft.

"Then again, if solitary confinement revs your engines—"

Rearing up, Prowl bit his white lips and dug his fingertips into Lockdown's jaw. The message was clear:

_You've kept me from my meditation. The least you can do is preserve the silence_.

Kid had an attitude. Lockdown didn't mind, and his eager, gritty rejoinder (which consisted of grinding into the other mech and fondling his port-littered lower back until Prowl melted into fierce, pleasure-soaked putty) proved it.

Still, the silence let him hear Prowl. The soft emissions of vapor, the power-relinquishing noises. Lockdown tended to roar and grunt and relish: Prowl absorbed, efficient and contained, but still vibrated tautly with all of that saved energy. He practically glowed with hidden ecstasy, which made the hunter want to crack him like a black Faberge egg to release it: which he usually did, with any amount of forceful foreplay. Lockdown felt almost brutal next to the smaller, streamlined mech--nearly undignified (if he had bothered to care)--but he knew his tangible dominance was what truly excited the reticent creature. So he was… content to be himself.

Prowl liked control, even if it wasn't his. Autonomy be damned, he _liked_ being wrenched from a wall and slammed onto a berth—as long as it was in goodwill, and pleasure was quick to follow. His right side was marred with Lockdown's overload-spurred hook-marks, but he never said a word. Maybe he enjoyed the small, stinging assaults, after all this time. He certainly never waxed them over, and Lockdown certainly wasn't one to ask.

Prowl's cries were small but never weak. Lockdown made a hobby of jacking them up to louder-higher-better, but what he enjoyed most was the silent gasp at the end: communicating a dimming world of crippling pleasure in nothing but vibration. It was silent, but deliciously substantial, much like his partner. Prowl would never scream out, but his young, overwhelmed gasps did Lockdown a world more good than any pleasure-model's syrupy screams of ecstasy.

No, those slaggin' bots just annoyed him. Prowl was honest and direct and _real_, just like himself.

And if it wasn't obvious already, he liked himself an awful lot.

As a rule, the interfacing was jarring, intense, frequent, and surprisingly drawn-out. Crammed against each other in the darkness of Prowl's berth, electricity snapping in the hot void between every seam and joint, their swollen Sparks strained past pulsing chassis-plates until Lockdown finally cracked his Faberge egg with his hook. Prowl arched and wrenched his stiff fingers into Lockdown's spiked neck as the liquid pleasure burst outward, swelling up and down his stunned systems. Overload swept them within nanokliks of each other as their Sparks brushed together like besotted stars, the erotic energy-burst severing their direct link and sending each shuddering into a steaming, white noise stillness. Both collapsed, bodies drained of all function as they went temporarily and euphorically offline.

Yes, life was good… even if it was a bit more complex than grabbing-games and the resulting hook-ups.

Before he approached his partner, Lockdown's level of aggravation—restlessness—may have technically been low, but to allow it to break the surface at all spoke of a deeper cause of frustration. Prowl was downright therapeutic: he teased out all of the hidden anger in a game beforehand, leaving it raging and on the surface, then allowed the electrifying ritual to scorch it from Lockdown's convoluted insides.

Manifest the negative energy, purge it, then replace it with good energy. Basic Zen.

After all, he had to please the older mech: to 'help' where necessary. A good mood was vital for their relationship to continue as it was, and Prowl was all for practicality. Especially if it involved… recreation of that sort. Yes.

In his own way, Lockdown was _kept_ just as well as the other mech. It unnerved him, the carefully orchestrated relief he felt after exiting Prowl's chambers time and again: the fact that the former-Autobot had that sort of control over him stalled him more than a few times. Now, he wondered how he had ever functioned without Prowl's ready form lurking just out of sight. Now, it seemed he _had_ emotions to attend to: they had surfaced, low and leering, and made their needs (less _space_ and more interfacing and more Prowl) known. Poor fraggers like Swindle apparently took the brunt of this new development, and Lockdown himself was still at odds with it. Certainly, life had been easier without Prowl, but he wasn't _changed_: he was still Lockdown the Undecided.

Soft-shell or not, he could still kick aft. His motivations had changed a little bit, that's all.

-.-.-.-.-.-

Lockdown was quicker to reboot, but slower to admit it. He lay still, optics offline, chassis airing out from sultry vapor. Humans called it 'afterglow', but it was probably more accurate a phrase with Cybertronians: trace currents of that golden energy still ran laps around his tender circuitry, hiding in small spaces and giving his formerly-scalding body a soft shine. Prowl was angled under him, leg wrapped around Lockdown's hip and just about as sentient as a rock. Blown out. The 'bot was young: overloads swept 'em hard at that age.

The bounty hunter sank into his business partner, breathing in deeply, left servo questing for Prowl's cooling side. He managed several cycles of absent stroking before Prowl came online with a halting gasp and a high-pitched humming noise, fingers re-digging into the older mech; Lockdown rolled aside.

Lockdown was content to fall wherever overloading placed them; Prowl disliked remaining intertwined after interfacing, but still allowed Lockdown to pet him at leisure. Compromise. Basic business practice.

"That was good," he purred after a few cycles of silence, hook gliding along the bare spot on Prowl's black undercarriage.

"I would hate to see exemplary," Prowl whispered. Lockdown chuckled, pinched the ninjabot's side and rearranged himself so he could push a boundary or two, hoisting his crushing black weight over Prowl's cream hips. Prowl made a faintly annoyed sound and dug a servo into Lockdown's green flank; the hunter ignored it.

"Lights," he murmured, toying with the sharp edge of the kid's collar-plating.

The room remained utterly black, with no hum or flicker of recognition from the ship's enveloping systems. Lockdown frowned, servo stilling on Prowl's shoulder.

"Moot, _lights_."

Nothing.

The former-Autobot still lay flat on the berth, but Prowl's visor glowed just enough to underscore his half-smile.

"I prefer the dark," he said archly.

This…was a problem.

"She only listens to you," Lockdown challenged him slowly, eyeing the supine ninjabot as if suspecting mutiny. The word _listens_ set him on edge: it was a sentient verb. Implied a choice. He didn't trust sentient ships, and Moot, dead for _eons_, seemed to be warming and rubbing electrons together under Prowl's attention. That explained the door-opening-of-its-own-accord thing. And the lights. He didn't like it.

Then again, the link with his ship was one more bond that tied Prowl to him, and any bond was a good bond. Prowl shook his head and looked up into Moot's dark rafters.

"Perhaps I'm the only one who listens to her," he murmured.

Lockdown rolled his optics and firmly collapsed into Prowl, who actually didn't refuse it.

Yep, the kid was a good lay… and a regular slaggin' fortune cookie.


	3. HighGrade

A/N: Yay!

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

High-Grade

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Prowl was a mean drunk.

Of course Lockdown—a frequent and joyous indulger of over-charging—had tried to get him soused: he considered it part of his scoundrel nature and duty to induct the young 'bot into the realm of tossing back high-grade and reveling in the resulting molecule-deep euphoria. That way, at the least, Prowl would be mentally inoperable, not in a bar full of strangers, but safe in a contained area with Lockdown.

Safe was a relative term.

The ninjabot knew it was unavoidable. When his partner pressed a glistening cube of high-grade into his hands after a particularly successful mission (war-marked face vibrating with expectation as he growled "Celebration." in an entirely unconvincing manner), Prowl did not refuse it. He took a look at the humming cube, then looked back to Lockdown—then, figuring every possible infringement on his honor had already occurred and Lockdown's 'unknown motives' were all quite known, experienced, and most likely enjoyed, he sipped at the sweet Energon. Lockdown grinned and watched him imbibe it.

No mistake, Prowl was fun when tipsy. He laughed at himself—a strange, free sound—and staggered slightly, but mostly _thought_. He turned things over in his processor and his normally inexpressive face became awash with the emotions those deep, deepity-deep thoughts provoked. He smiled, glowed, and remained secretively quiet, but the vibrating vibrancy of his body was so different that Lockdown still liked to watch for a bit.

Any dirty proposition Lockdown made when drinking was met with an appalled look and something just short of a _blush_, but the kid was still amusing.

However, when he got honestly over-charged, things sometimes took a turn for the worse. First off, he was an easy drunk. Most times, he would drink himself into a smiling stupor and simply fall over, chassis awash with electricity-licking sensations and a lovely detachment—a far cry from the outrageously judgment-impaired sex-kitten behavior Lockdown had been shooting for, but still comfortingly standard. Otherwise…the first time he sought succor in slag-faced state, his sullen musings carried over. Overcharging tended to wipe all of a bot's maintenance personality programming away, and without one's 'façade', blocked problems and data surfaced with a vengeance and swarmed the memory core.

Prowl became grim and violent when he drank, withdrawing from any resemblance of sociable interaction and regarding his surroundings with a caged look. He did not speak, he did not make optic-linkage, and any attempt to approach him was often met with a sloppy preemptive attack. As far as Lockdown figured, the memory-shot 'bot was still somehow stuck back on Earth, fighting for his life and stuck in survival mode. Tension eating him from the inside out. Miserable. After seven stellar-cycles of war, he had a lot of gruesome material to pull from: Prowl would either fall into the good part of his memory core or the bad part of his memory core, and he got downright vicious when he fell into the bad part.

It made Lockdown glad, in a starkly satisfied way, that Prowl was with him now. On the other hand, it was also damn annoying to try and sweet-talk him out of his funks, or deal with his surly aft _at all_.

Once, fed up with sideways verbal negotiations, Lockdown tried to touch him—just a friendly grab of his shoulder. Without missing a beat, Prowl twisted and socked him in the gut as hard as he could. Lockdown struck back before he had a chance to process it, and a klik later Prowl was laid flat across the floor of his ship, arm nearly knocked loose from its sparking socket. Shaking his stinging servo and cursing in honest vexation, Lockdown hauled the near-comatose mech over his shoulder and dumped him in his room after a few rudimentary repairs to his scapular plating. Prowl rebooted with a sore shoulder and knowledge of a loss of control—an impression that their drinking session had gone too far somehow-- and Prowl didn't like it.

Lockdown wasn't half so eager to offer him high-grade after that, and Prowl simply never asked for it. There were other ways to celebrate.


	4. Material Temptations

A/N: AW. CUTE.

… How does that apply to them? HOW? I swear, I scare myself. But the idea of Prowl and Lockdown window-shopping makes me squee like an idiot. I find it so funny how they can be so indirectly SWEET with each other, but still not be… gooey.

(Admit it, Prowl. LOCKDOWN IS YO' SUGA-DADDY.)

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Material Temptations

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Lockdown's business was inter-galactic by nature: the market for illegal person-disposal was universal and he came when called, so long as the price was high enough. When not on-call, he still wandered and business still took him strange places… few of which were of legal nature.

There were several hubs around which people like himself revolved. The eternal favorite was Dulcon, the intergalactic black market planet: a lawless meeting place for both planned exchanges of merchandise (it was comforting in its lawlessness in the sense that every man was for himself, and that burning individualism prevented any possibility of being ganged up on because no one wanted to _work_ with the selfish, turncoat bastards that frequented it) and open-market sales. Although he hadn't visited Dirty Dulcon in an alarmingly long while, Lockdown had one such arrangement for an exchange. He was to meet a large-scale arms-dealer for some kind of complex mod for Moot, and Prowl stoically refused to remain behind on the ship, no matter how Lockdown griped at him.

It wasn't that he wanted to protect the kid in a mental sense: the bounty hunter didn't care about innocence in the least, and might have taken a perverse pleasure in introducing him to the scruffier (Stripped-Club saturated) side of the galaxy in better circumstances. Prowl tagging along just required double the attention and effort on Lockdown's part—things everyone was short on in a high-danger place like Dulcon—and the mech had a schedule to keep. He wasn't a nanny-bot. Besides, the ninjabot's usual reserve might be taken as cowardice in a place where storming around with guns, glowing 'mods and a large chin was expected if not mandatory—and the only guarantee against not being pulled into an alley and stripped down to your substructure.

Still, things were how they were, and that included Prowl coming along for the ride. As always, Lockdown sucked it up and got to business.

Stalking down the crowded alleyways, Lockdown kept his partner behind him and a little to the left: Prowl was pretty, and pretty things went quick on Dulcon, either to the highest bidder or the quickest set of servos. Now, he wasn't entirely _averse_ to the idea of Prowl as a succulent bot-toy that he'd charmed over and decked out in all the customized 'mods money could buy, only to parade him around for the general greedy spectacle of it… but he could barely see how it might come across that way to an uninformed bystander. His rep was enough to frighten any would-be stall-strippers away from Prowl, but there was no telling what might happen if they got separated.

Just in case, Lockdown slipped a tracking device under Prowl's thrusters while the kid was recharging. Just to be safe.

When they arrived, it morphed into a surprisingly domestic scene: the universal 'shopping' ritual. The partners strode down the aisles of the Dulcon black market at a firm pace, Lockdown never bothering to look at the dingy open-air stalls to either side despite the promises vomited from hawking organics and inorganics alike. Prowl, conversely, was fascinated: he stayed in the bounds of the bounty hunter's heavy shadow, but gorged his sensors on everything around him. He'd never experienced anything like the black market, nor was he familiar with the general trend of merchandise, so every outrageous spiked apparatus and small, tooth-filled organic caught his optic, but never caused him to stop.

Then he passed something slick and black and rimmed with gold.

No, _two_ beautiful somethings propped up against one other amidst a pile of clunky refuse, each emitting an aqua phosphorescence at the bottom. He stopped for a moment, then realized a moment wasn't nearly sufficient for something so extraordinary: Lockdown's ground-devouring strides threatened to take the bounty hunter away into the writhing crowd, so he touched his partner's elbow. Lockdown stopped and craned his head around, arching his brow.

"What?"

"Look," Prowl murmured, staying close to Lockdown's wide back. He pointed at the purple-plated stall, visor glowing with interest. Perhaps because the rest of the counter was littered with unwaxed, half-repaired junk, it was obvious what he was captivated by.

"Mm. Ren-tech," Lockdown said after a moment, taking in the heel-strut 'mods appraisingly. They were ornate caps of black and gold, meant to be fitted over the heel-strut and base of a lightweight mech's foot. Though small and improperly displayed—the dealer probably didn't even know what they were--Lockdown could tell what tech-concept they utilized: the caps produced a levitation/anti-friction field from the thin crystal panels that would create a 'skating' effect, increase momentum with the small jets concealed on the bottom, and make jarring falls a thing of the past. In sum, quicker, lighter, better.

Lockdown shrugged.

"Your professional opinion?" Prowl asked lightly, optics still fixed unwaveringly on the merchandise.

"You don't need 'em," Lockdown snorted, reaching out to cup Prowl's waist gruffly and squeeze. Prowl did not move away. "You're quick as sound on your own, and only idiots ignore basic laws like friction or gravity. Gimmick like that could get you killed."

Prowl, visor still shining, kept his silence.

They left the area and headed off to the 'social' side of the pseudo-city, Prowl resuming his protected niche behind his large partner (and ignoring the many wanton leers sent his way by mismatched mechs). They arrived at the bar where Lockdown had made his arrangements, only to find it closed for another megacycle with the peddler in question nowhere to be seen. After fiddling with something uncharacteristically small and complex on his wrist, Lockdown realized (in a roaring, inarticulate way) that he'd gotten the time-zones wrong and had two megacycles to burn.

While it was better than missing the appointment, there was nothing left to do but wander in the filthy alleys and pretend to window-shop. Lockdown wasn't above it (he'd found a few good steals that way), but they needed to stay within the area, and that's where the problem lay. He couldn't help but notice Prowl's visor carefully following the dainty strut-caps each time they walked by, despite how the bounty hunter actively called his attention to other items of varying (and grotesque) natures. It was no use: even an attempt at scandalously honest conversation garnered no response. Prowl was absolutely fixated.

Practicality or style be damned, the kid really wanted that 'mod.

More than that, he wanted it just to _want_ it, and Lockdown couldn't help but take a gritty bit of pleasure in that. Prowl rarely stooped to such a materialistic level, and it also gave the bounty hunter a satisfying edge: Prowl never _asked_ for anything, self-contained as he was, but on this strange planet it was now within his power to get the kid what he wanted.

That idea made him a good deal happier than it should've, he knew, but he was all for small pleasures. The only reason Prowl didn't walk from under Lockdown's shadow to get them himself was the bounty hunter's warning: he specifically told the young mech not to approach any stalls (or dark alleys), even though Prowl had his own money—probably more than Lockdown by this point, because of his dirty little habit of holing it away. Regardless, Prowl didn't know how to deal with Dulconian haggling (which resulted in spontaneous being-slaughter one-fifth of the time), so if anyone was going to talk down a vendor, it had to be Lockdown.

For a variety of reasons (the majority associated with intense annoyance), Lockdown gave in the third time they passed the upgrades.

"Let's get the run-down on those caps," he grumbled roughly, changing his course like a bulldozer with not a few shopper collusions. "'Fore you burn a hole through them with your optics."

Prowl didn't say a word, but Lockdown could feel his energy spike, tense and hopeful. Pit, if only he could get the punky 'bot so earnestly worked up about anything else: anything besides sex and meditation, that is. _Aberrant little slagger_, Lockdown half-thought affectionately. All gruffness (and an peculiar, near-invisible kind of consort bravado), the bounty hunter stopped at the stooped stall, reached up and rang a bell with his hook.

"Alright, let's take a—"

"Lockdown, ancient buddy!"

The fabric-draped doorway in the back produced a quivering, pimply mass: it rolled out toward them and slammed to a halt at the counter, a ragged orifice hanging wide in the middle of it. Prowl recoiled slightly out of shock, but Lockdown's reaction was quick and decided, powered by a revolted recognition.

"Primus, not _you_," he snapped, drawing back in disgust.

It took Prowl (inexperienced Prowl) a few nanokliks to pick out features he could recognize in the creature: from those hints and the tone, he was able to piece together that the vendor was trying to be… charming, and the rest of his traits fell easily into place.

He was a twitchy, sycophantic dirt-bag with a knack for overpricing and driving customers up the wall with his whistling, whining half-speech. A basic salesman, yes, but not with that affluent gush of confidence that Swindle possessed. Lockdown's insides rumbled, deep and disapproving.

"Why say?" The blob demanded, reddish orifice snagging at the edges and stretching: sociable guile. "Betting you don't give lip like this to a Swindle, you old war-lion."

"Swindle's respectable, well-connected, and his merch has weight. Plus, I know where he lives, and most of the places he hides," Lockdown growled, sporting an evil grin. He turned and clapped a hand on Prowl's back, then jerked his head. "We're outta here. I gotta get to that bar: I'll get you somethin' _there_."

The vendor stretched past the littered counter, dirty mass undulating as he caught Prowl's attention behind Lockdown's back. He coaxed the former Autobot in with a subtle (and amorphous and _wet_) wave.

"You interest on what I selling, big ninja-bot?" The organic tried quickly. He 'grinned', displaying gelatinous red flesh-cones and walking his 'fingers' across the beautiful mods. Prowl twitched hesitantly. "I could work a deal on you—"

"Access denied, pal," Lockdown growled, brusquely taking Prowl's wrist. The younger mech bucked with a small, vexed sound, but didn't pull away. "You don't scam anything off on this one."

"Lockdown a nanny-bot?" The vendor snapped shrilly, then instantly bit his deformed triple-split tongue. As incensed as he was at being deprived of a clean sale, the blob twitched away when Lockdown sent him a scathing glare and tugged his impressionable partner back to his side.

Lockdown succeeded in dragging Prowl out of the marketplace, but once they were in the clear, the ninjabot freed himself with a temperamental jerk, then did the Prowl-equivalent of crossing his arms and stamping his feet: a dull, short sound and a turn of his head. He was not pleased. The bounty hunter let him go, but shook his head in residual disgust.

"Primus. I know that pus-wad: the one guarantee from him is that anything he's selling will cost you an arm and a processor, and be bug-frag defective. That's a life-long warrantee: if they work, you get your money back. If you can _find_ him."

Prowl didn't look at him the whole way to the bar, and silently took a seat in a none-too nearby booth when Lockdown sat down at the smoky table to negotiate. It wasn't forward enough to be disrespect (or an immature sucker-punch, even), but it was definitely pointed, and Lockdown fought the urge to look over his shoulder and glare at the kid all through his closing negotiations with the arms-dealer. He firmly blamed his botched haggling and the resulting 2000-credit price jump on Prowl.

Lockdown learned he had decidedly short patience with temper tantrums, but Prowl didn't push his luck. He cleaned up his act in a solar-cycle or two: it was simply the way Lockdown had treated him that gotten his wires tangled. The bounty hunter didn't deny the disrespect he'd served the kid by _dragging_ him out of the stall when he was perfectly capable of walking—but he'd only done what was physically necessary to clear the area as fast as possible. After that misunderstanding settled, the issue of the mods still remained like a pink elephant in the room.

Or a pink elephant on a tiny, tiny ship (regardless of whether she now sported a rather dashing deep-space harpoon, overpriced as it was).

Prowl wasn't himself. He wasn't moping (the older mech would have had to hurt him if so), but he was definitely thinking too much: and that was by Lockdown's standards, who would normally ban Prowl from the insides of his own head if he could. Lockdown's disapproval of the caps actually meant something, and even though Prowl had more than enough credit to buy them himself and was very independent on any other front, he still liked to be educated and taken care of concerning money. He trusted Lockdown's prowess with the stuff, and would rather concern himself with the 'universe within' than the temptations (and complex inconveniences) of material pleasures.

Still, he wanted the caps. He felt guilty about wanting them, and he knew he shouldn't disregard Lockdown's advice, but Primus he still wanted them.

Lockdown, consequently, still had the power to get Prowl what he wanted so badly. That proved a temptation beyond his self-control: a few solar-cycles after Dulcon, he waited until Prowl had retreated to his nook of the ship for some routine meditation and (grudgingly, groaning all the way) searched up a frequency only a fool would dial.

It took him nearly a megacycle to find the vendor, sifting through different channels and threatening frequency drones with death and dismemberment when necessary. When he finally snagged the right connection, Ikr waited a healthy long time before dropping the cloaking filter and gurgling:

"Ancient bud—"

"Spare me," Lockdown growled, putting up a servo. "You still got that piece?"

"What piece-piece?"

"The caps. Heel-caps." Lockdown pressed onwards as Ikr only looked at him (or such was the general assumption) blankly with his non-eyes. "Gold and black. Ren-tech."

Lockdown knew he was educating Ikr on his own merchandise, but he got the message.

"You wanting them?" The conniving vendor squeaked, making a gooey show of 'realizing' the piece in question. "You want them one-a-kinder robot caps? Way far from Cybertronia?"

The vomit of words made the bounty hunter want to kill the miserable blob. Lockdown hesitated, mentally slapping himself in the forehead.

"Yeah, I do. That'd be…nice," he said grimly, holding back the tide of defeat in his vocals. It was all he could say to 'one of a kind'. Ikr grinned.

Dulconians could smell need. Lockdown needed that piece, and when someone is your only option… well, he knew the drill. No negotiability.

He was gonna pay through the pipes for this one, and that hurt--even if it was coming from Prowl's account.

--

Prowl was curled in his partner's oversized navigator chair, humming data-pad propped against his crooked leg when Lockdown wordlessly tossed the caps into his lap.

The former Autobot jerked, taking an inordinately long time to realize what the little things were, then fell into a stunned, open-mouthed silence. The caps glowed softly in his lap; Prowl didn't dare touch them yet. Datapad face-down, he gazed up at his partner, and Lockdown waited for the reactions to cycle across his face, calculating which one the kid would settle on.

He wasn't disappointed by the show. Finally, Prowl swallowed and smiled.

"Thank you," he murmured ardently, visor shining again. Pit, he was so _grateful_. It was intensely weird, but also pleasant. Very pleasant. Then again, he was probably too-aware of what his partner went through to get them: Lockdown just hoped he wouldn't think too hard on it, because he detested sticky emotional implications (probably because they _implied that he had emotions_). The hunter shrugged, enjoying his masculine nonchalance, and waved his servo in Prowl's general direction.

"I'll screw those onto you sometime tomorrow. Try 'em out. Just say the word."

"Impressive," Prowl breathed, taking them into his hands like eggshell gems and turning them over in the ship's cold air. The kid lit up, feeling and _experiencing_ the new pieces in that certain consuming way he always did: the way that screamed he was sucked in from his pedes to his processor in whatever he was investigating.

Lockdown grinned, and thought maybe money did buy happiness. It was damn overpriced, though, and refunds were out of the question.

Events proceeded with miserable predictability. Just as Lockdown forewarned, the caps were both dangerous and defective: Prowl nearly shattered his back-struts with the damn things after an uncontrollable nine hundred meter 'skate' on a rocky planet and the cumulative, plate-shattering smash into a cliff-face. His burly partner had to dig him out, cursing and ranting all the while. Understandably, he swore off them, but kept the pretty things in his cramped room as a testament to the ill returns of materialistic lust… and Lockdown's spotty kindness.

He placed them right next to the tracking device: another silent, weird kindness that provoked not a few smiles in the dark.


	5. WaxJobs and Unprofessionalism

A/N: This one is such crack XD I stretched it, but I LIKE IT. Lockdown's immature impatience (and the remedies he seeks) is the WIN.

HUHU DIRTY OLD MECH.

-.-.-.-.-.-

Wax-jobs and Unprofessionalism

-.-.-.-.-.-

He may have been darkly playful at times, but Prowl still had a sense of decorum: something Lockdown had lost eons ago. This included a social correctness that still showed its well-defined head in verbal exchanges, even with his unrefined partner, and need of dignity in front of unfamiliar beings, especially in regards to his status as a respectable and mature equal.

Above all things, it meant he generally didn't approve of being fondled while Lockdown was on the communicator.

Lockdown was famous for pushing boundaries. He knew Prowl's little hang-ups, and fiercely inflamed every one of them as often as he could… but that was only when he was feeling obnoxious. So when Prowl wandered in on the middle of a supply-ordering call (during which time Lockdown had been put on hold for nearly half a megacycle and was very bored because he _hated_ being put on hold and he _hated_ ordering supplies and was thus feeling very obnoxious at the time), Lockdown wasted no time in scooping the other mech up onto his chair-arm with a side-ways motion once he (so foolishly) ventured near enough.

Prowl made a displeased noise, but leaned against the bounty hunter's spiked shoulder nonetheless.

"What's this?"

"Supply call. We're low on the basics," he answered blankly, waiting only a few kliks before nosing against Prowl's side and rubbing earnestly: the kid was the most interesting thing he'd seen or felt in… definitely half a static-filled mega-cycle. Prowl frowned down at him, making a weak attempt to slide off the chair-arm, but Lockdown's iron grip caught him.

"You're on business," he said sternly.

"It's only vocal," Lockdown lied winningly, grinning up at his partner from his tattoo-rimmed optics. "Those stiff-struts can't see anything."

It was a proposition so open it flapped in the wind. Prowl made a disgusted noise and tried to get off again. He was only provoked into speaking again when Lockdown, once again, pointedly refused to let him go.

"You're an _amazingly_ unprofessional professional. I doubt few have reached the same levels of unprincipled conduct as you with such limited resources."

"It's amazing what you can do with just one pretty 'bot and a lot of spare time," Lockdown agreed cheerfully and leaned down to scrape his mouth across Prowl's hip, kissing the tender plating in challenge. "Then again, I can run multi-tasking programs like a regular factory."

Prowl's reaction was much like watching a contained explosion. Lockdown still got a kick out of how absolutely_ mortified_ he became whenever he was teased—even if it was just the two of them. According to him, interfacing had a time and a place. Lockdown would take it anywhere, and often tried to: Prowl resisted full heartedly, only allowing the occasional romp in the hangar, then firmly refused to give into Lockdown's 'It was good, wasn't it?' demands afterward when they were both exhausted on the floor.

Understandably, being in front of the silent comm-screen with the supply company's logo glaring at them (perhaps accusingly, vocal-only link or no) as Lockdown… _molested_ him was more than he could bear. Before he could attempt to hop off again, Lockdown snagged him closer, burying his face in the kid's waist and muttering:

"C'mon, sit. For Spark's sake, I'm bored."

"That's all the more reason for me to leave," Prowl answered, irritated. "You're dangerous when bored."

Lockdown didn't respond, because Lockdown wasn't listening. In fact, Lockdown was now intensely focused on drawing his hook along Prowl's leg just lightly enough to scratch the wax in various wavy patterns across the curve of his cream thighs: undoing two megacycles of work on Prowl's part for waxing.

Prowl enjoyed waxing, much like any other 'bot. It was a segmented hygiene ritual, and very personal, but he'd found that strange, boundary-less Lockdown enjoyed waxing _him_. He relished the act of wedging his servos into all of Prowl's tender places and arousing him as much as possible, if just to annoy him. The act was as close as he came to being covetous, but it was more lecherous than anything: much like how virile human males would adore rubbing lotion over a nubile, well-formed female human… and as Cybertronians went, Prowl was both exceedingly well-formed and nubile.

Lockdown liked bringing the ninjabot to a healthy sheen, even though the tense occurrence always culminated in it being burned off in a faintly disgusting manner, with the heat of their merge causing the unsealed wax to pour off his black plating like water. Carbon-saturated and thick with the nauseating smell of burning lipids, it pooled around the two of them and _cooled_, which was doubly disgusting and time-consuming to work out of. All in all, it wasn't one of Prowl's favorite things to do.

Uninformed of all these testy personal opinions, the bounty-hunter continued his 'work' on Prowl's wax-job.

"You're ruining it," Prowl said somewhat hopelessly. It was going downhill, all of it, and he knew it. His misery was rising so fast that he could almost swim in it.

"Yeah. Figure if I mess it up good enough, you'll let me fix it."

Lockdown kissed his hip again, powerful chassis rumbling with something short of a purr. Prowl twitched. The System Supplies screen shone on, wavering ever-so slightly, just threatening to come alive and make it a voyeur situation.

"You bring the wax. We could have a Pit of a time—"

Without warning, Lockdown yanked the ninjabot into his lap and wrapped a leg over his cream-colored hips, nipping at the back of his neck and groping at the inside of his legs.

"Or we could be efficient and use this on-hold time wisely."

"Lockdown!"

Prowl stared fearfully up at the judgmental screen, nearly rigid with shock, then made to bat the bounty hunter away before something truly _awful_ could happen. Unfortunately, Lockdown was utterly overpowering, strong grip pinning Prowl's arms to his sides. The other mech was a muscle car, alas, and his casual attentions were much akin to being sexually assaulted by a bulldozer.

Twisting around, Prowl bucked; Lockdown made a brazenly appreciative noise, and the smaller mech froze as he realized _where_ he was pressed against and what _exactly_ Lockdown was getting out of his struggles. He shuttered his optics in suffocating frustration, dearly wanting to turn and hammer his partner's face in.

"You know how I said we were just on speaker? I lied," Lockdown whispered, invasive servo creeping along Prowl's smooth pelvic plating, owning and groping. "You wanna get caught? It's fun, promise."

His surprisingly skilled fingers honed in on a sweet wire-bundle and flicked it, causing Prowl to bite his lip and stifle a vexed, hot noise.

"Make a pretty face for the camera--"

That was _it_.

Wrenching one arm free, Prowl blindly reached up and slapped him sloppily across the cheek, face glowing in true anger. Lockdown _still_ didn't let go.

"Ouch, Slick. Don't be like that," the hunter plied him, white face still contorted in that damnable curled grin over his shoulder. "Be _nice_."

Somehow, Prowl got loose: regardless of whether it involved a blow or three, or a sly bite, he struggled off Lockdown's lap and made to escape with the aching remnants of his dignity. Lockdown half-dove out of his chair and caught the fleeing mech's ankle, grinning impishly when Prown turned to gape at him. It was dirty, excessive, ridiculous, and understandably, the ninjabot's hackles rose to full force.

Now, it was possible to assume it before, but… yes, Lockdown _was_ feeling downright obnoxious that day, and no, Prowl _wasn't_ in the mood.

The scuffle ended abruptly when Prowl switched to Alt mode, the pull of his rearranging parts yanking the wheel-structure out of Lockdown's grip and tucking it into the gleaming motorcycle. Prowl revved his engine testily and drove off, plunging into the winding (if limited) hallways of Moot—who was sure to protect him any way she could, obnoxiously enough.

"Okay, okay. You win," Lockdown drawled, watching him go. He shook his head and turned back to the blank screen, mouth drifting into a lazy, lush smirk. "You'll be back."

The screen pinged, a slim femme coming onscreen with a prepared and completely unaware smile.

"Hello, System Supplies, how can I help you?"

One day, he'd realize himself to be nothing but a dirty old mech.


	6. Short Beauty

A/N: M'awww. PROWL.

(Of course I couldn't keep it happy. THIS UNIVERSE ISN'T HAPPY, why should Prowl be?!)

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Short Beauty

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Lockdown was willing to keep Prowl happy, provided it didn't cost him anything.

That guideline was fast blurring, however, in the realm of direct and indirect 'cost': he didn't intend on shelling out thousands of credits for the kid, but he found he often took losses while whim-catering, even if he didn't actually pay a cent for the small distractions the ninjabot took such pleasure in. Jobs flew by, money was missed. Calls were put on hold, all while Prowl remained delightedly ignorant of their livelihood draining away. He _felt_ the money slipping away. Yes, it was hard to regret something you never had in the first place, but Lockdown had plenty of energy and determination to direct toward the skill and pulled it off magnificently.

Still, there were rewards to a happy ninjabot, and he wasn't lying: once Prowl had settled in, there was no place he wouldn't take the kid. No place at all.

-.-.-.-.-

Lockdown leaned back in his navigational chair, looking decidedly to the left of the large, static-speckled comm-screen in front of him. This would have been fine, and even casual had the screen not been occupied, but it caused the purple-optic'ed mech on the other end to nearly grind his teeth. At risk of being ignored entirely even after fifteen cycles of plying the bounty hunter, Swindle put on a trust-bolstering laugh—a bit strained, as it was his fourth for the day—and snapped his fingers at his associate and sometimes-compadre.

"Cmon-n-n. I'm _serious_, Lockdown—this is a fine venture for the two of us, but time is _limited_!" He gushed, blinking quickly. "The _whole planet_ will be down for their little festival: it's an in-out job! You wouldn't let an _opportunity_ like this pass you by just to keep your mileage low, right?"

His wiggling enthusiasm could have choked a small organic, but Lockdown just shook his head.

"Y'know, I'd take you up on that. Except, uh… we're fine," he explained. He caught the 'we' pronoun and corrected it, vocals hardening a bit. His independence was very important, and _expected_ from mechs like Swindle. "I'm fine money-wise. I'll just wait for the next bite: knock yourself out on Plunto."

Swindle was one of the most discerning mechs on his side of the galaxy. He was the temperature-taker, the perceptive one, the near-psychic businessman who knew just which way to dance for a sale and had the talent to back it up. He often came to Lockdown with deals that required a little more of a… servos-on approach, and the mech had never once let him down. Theirs was a golden link, built on convenience and practicality with no toes to step on and plenty of money underfoot. Very _fun_.

Things, however, had changed lately. His conclusion from this strange, half-megacycle exchange with his crusty bounty-hunting compatriot (one of many, and not the last) was that the mech was glitching all across the board, and the arms-dealer was more worried than he should be: purely in a practical sense, of course.

He couldn't exactly partner up with a clinically malfunctioning mech with nothing left in his logic drive but dead ports and expect a good return. Swindle scoffed at him good-naturedly.

"The Lockdown I know is never _fine_ money-wise. Pit, 'fine' doesn't even apply to money! You look a little _tense_: what kind of a stationary mess are you in, bucko?" Swindle asked archly, shifting exaggeratedly as his purple optics flickered around, as though he could lean forward and see further into Lockdown's dark ship. "Hostage situation? Broken ship? I can't hear anything back there—is cute old Mood still _chugging_? You know, I've got a few—"

"I just can't go anywhere right now, and I don't want to." He paused a minute before finishing (gruffly, as though he didn't even want to): "And it's _Moot_."

"C'mon, guy, enough with the _excuses_! I need your muscle," Swindle professed, grinning. "I wouldn't _trust_ this run to anyone but my sketchy bounty-hunting _friend_!"

"_Can't_, Swindle," Lockdown ground out. "I'm on a… pit-stop. Beta-CF5 quadrant."

The way he said it and looked to the left, afire with gripping-ripping _impatience_, made Swindle roll his optics in a moment of façade-weakness. It made sense. He'd been avoiding it in the starry hopes that Lockdown had more reliable logic-coding than that, but it made sense. It was the _Autobot_.

He worried (in his fascinated, condescending way) to see an accomplished fellow entrepreneur of destruction going so haywire over such a weird little mech. There were so few of skill out in the galaxy, Swindle couldn't afford to lose his top associate, but had watched Lockdown compromise and hack at his schedule to fit the adorable little fragger into his life. The fact that Lockdown was refusing a perfectly valid and deliciously lucrative adventure made the arms-dealer think the kid had wiped the hunter's coding when he was in stasis. Never should trust Autobots: Swindle didn't trust anybody anyways, but Autobots were more finiky than most. Afire with advice, but familiar enough with Lockdown to know he wouldn't accept it, opportunist Swindle realized their negotiation was over and settled for a possible satisfaction of curiosity.

"Is it the little lady?" He wheedled, giving the bounty hunter a gooey, knowing look.

"Kid likes organic stuff," Lockdown grunted, shrugging.

Swindle paused as he processed that idea, a strange expression itching at his flat face.

"You're on an organic planet."

Lockdown nodded.

"And he's out there. You brought him there. And he's just… out there?"

"Yep."

"What does he do: _roll around_ in it?" He asked, all gushing bravado dropped and replaced with an intense, half-disgusted wariness. Lockdown smirked at the change. He could consider himself privileged to be one of the few to see Swindle's flinty, non-business side, but he couldn't appreciate what he didn't consider noteworthy. Everybody had alternate personality programming: it was nothing to get locked up about.

"He ain't defective, Swindle," he retorted, swiveling slowly in his chair to look to his left: apparently to wherever the former Autobot was hiding. "Pit if I know: too long en route and it's 'botanical system' this and 'nature reserve' that. He just stares at it, then comes back inside. But it does somethin' for him."

"Tell me you disinfect him when he comes back on board," Swindle deadpanned. Lockdown chuckled as he imagined himself taking the high-pressure air-lock disinfectant to Prowl as he reentered the ship. Kid would think he'd gone crazy. Might bolt out into the woods and never come back. Live like a wild thing.

Lockdown half-worried about that sometimes.

"He's sharp enough to mind his own crevices," Lockdown mumbled lazily. Swindle looked as though he'd been flushed with sour oil, then been asked for a _refund_.

"That's _disgusting_," he gasped.

Somewhere outside the ship's bridge, the familiar sound (and sensation) of a pressure-lock disengaging made Lockdown look to his left again. Moot went crazy if anyone approached the ship without a Tag, so that meant Prowl was done with his little organic sojourn; the hunter's face relaxed. Like a light had been switched on, Swindle's eager businessman persona dominated the screen again, all blank smile.

"Well, that's my cue to head off! Really disappointed, Lockdown, by the way," he professed, tone faintly and expertly mournful. "I was really looking forward to rushing Plunto with you, but your values seem to have taken an unfortunate turn for the relationship-constricted worse. You know, next time, you might not be the first one I come to with a find like this."

"Go ding your own over-modded diodes, hawkbot," Lockdown grumbled fondly, regarding the arms dealer from half-shuttered optics. "You know I'm the best around. You'll call me when you need me."

"But," Swindle returned ominously, "will I be there when _you_ need me?"

The arms-dealer barely had time to shrug before Lockdown cut him off. He shut down the communicator screen and stood up, stretching and shaking away the 'conversation' and its implied loss… and the possible threat. Plunto would have been good, but they were in the backwater side of Beta galaxy, and the travel-time was impossible; no use whining about it. Already, even with Prowl barely inside, he felt life could get started again: no more pit-stops (they were Pit-stops for the action-obsessed hunter, really) for at least another month, and that was enough to relax and have a cube of high-grade over.

Prowl returned silently, stepping into the red-lit bridge with a steady, blind gait and something cradled in his servos. It was a moment before Lockdown sorted the fleshy pink bits of it and the curling stem from his partner's black plating, but it was a 'flower', and Prowl was holding it like it was a protoform, surveying it from every angle with that direct blue visor of his. Lockdown arched his brow.

As his partner watched, the ninjabot found an old jar, scalped together some organic nutrient-paste, poured in some water-like substance from the planet and reverently attended the little plant to the best of his abilities. Lockdown knew the punk was eccentric, and was usually able to abide it in silence and get on with what he was doing, but this intent, clinking circus pushed the limit of his skepticism. Finally, when Prowl placed the mini-ecosystem on his lap and tucked himself into a chair, he had to break the quiet.

"That's not gonna last three kliks once we're up," he grunted.

"I know," Prowl said heavily, caressing the blossom with one digit. "It fell. That's the only reason."

The only reason he'd taken it was because it was technically already dead. He never would have cut a flower, but he brought this one into his life for the short beauty it had.

Lockdown shrugged and rolled his shoulders, getting ready to push Moot back up into space. She seemed to yawn when he prodded her engines, lulled to sleep by the lush planet and its array of song-aerials that Lockdown couldn't give a broken shifter about, but otherwise ascended obediently into the atmosphere and beyond like a spiny red-detailed balloon. Prowl never looked away from the delicate blossom, absorbing it with every part of himself. Stealing moments from that jarred bit of life with its nutrient dish.

The instant the ship took off into deep space, the flower's cells collapsed and the beautiful life withered in the sudden rush of anti-atmosphere and crushing cold. It curled into a pile of dry brown-green dust. Prowl touched his forehead to the jar.

The flower had already fallen, but the inevitability of the death did not matter: Prowl had claimed and furthered a part of its agony. It should have at least been able to die where it wanted, but he had stolen it for bittersweet succor; singled it out and killed it through his selfishness instead of 'letting it die'. Lockdown would have been able to look at it in such a final way—dead was dead—but Prowl was sensitive to the journey it took before its spark was extinguished, and he couldn't help but think he'd served it ill. The former Autobot curled up in the dark ship and watched the dust settle and felt his sadness grow.

More than that, he watched a fragile organic creature die in a cold, unknown place and thought vaguely of a little earth female that he had loved more than life.


	7. Severance of Self

A/N: Just pretend that Autobot sigils aren't little decals, but are actually like raised, enamel-filled CRESTS. Because that's so much more dramatic! Oh, and this is a time-jump flash-back thing.

...I think I'm implying a lot of things with Lockdown that I didn't intend to, but who knows? Maybe the adorable little fragger wasn't born neutral!

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Severance of Self

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

When it came time to do it, not a word was said about anesthesia. Both of them knew: this had to be felt.

The preparations were silent. Lockdown didn't speak, except when he had to: such as when Prowl flinched as the first of the cuffs clamped over his carpal-seams, face whipping towards the hunter. They were still… wary of each other, but Lockdown didn't take offense or eke out a cruel joke. Instead, he shook his head.

"I can't have you twitching around. Could cut into your plating."

He tugged at them to make sure they stuck, and Prowl exhaled and leaned back, trembling, on the berth.

No, anesthesia wasn't an option. He had to feel it; had to live this self-mutilation and _learn_ from it. This couldn't be anything but what it was: a severance of self.

Prowl forced himself to watch as the bounty hunter—turned half-obligingly toward him for that exact reason—booted up the high-frequency cutting wire, wrapping and affixing it to its pronged base. It gave off an insidious orange-green glow as the vibrations brought the wire to scalding, lighting Lockdown's ghastly, absorbed face from below like an eerie hallucination.

Even as he approached the table, Lockdown didn't speak, or lecture. He didn't have to: the kid didn't need to be told, and his words—his views, his _psalms_, things he had never said but Prowl _knew_--were already hovering in the dry, charged space air.

_Don't follow causes. Causes are nothin' but sticky, restrictive cesspools of mass-input programming. Someone's always gonna take advantage of your trust, and someone's always gonna leave you to rot, and it's usually the 'bot in charge._

_You gotta be free. Do what you want: be your one and only cause. The one you'll never have to compromise for, or rethink._

Prowl had asked Lockdown to do it.

"Yeah, I'll do it," Lockdown had answered, staring down at him with an unnervingly _real_ expression. "You just can't think any less of it, just 'cos you aren't doin' it with your own two servos."

_Give up everything to be everything. Neutrality—flexibility, the ability to cut and run or stay and pay--is the greatest tool in the universe, and we always win_.

Prowl almost stopped him, when Lockdown's knee was in his immobile side and the wire came to hover hotly just above his glossy red crest. His identity, his legacy, his _moral home._ Perhaps Lockdown felt the invisible clench and jitter of his joints—or impossibly, perhaps he knew the guilt-sick hesitation and the fear of being alone in the basest sense possible and _never being able to go back_—but he had looked up at Prowl for a solid cycle before flicking the wire to the hottest setting and driving it down into the metal of Prowl's Autobot life.

It should have hurt more, but Prowl gasped nonetheless. His body jerked as the slicing tool melted and jack-hammered the metal on a molecular scale, sending a suffocating vibration through his chassis. Lockdown was precise and ruthless: he guided the deadly orange wire within a nanometer of Prowl's exostructure, cleaving away the thin enamel-drenched sigil like a slice of cheap ore. All it took was one pass.

One pass, three cycles and the smell of burning metal. Sari, Optimus, Bulkhead, Bumblebee and Ratchet. Gone.

The ninjabot cried out harshly as the sigil came cracking off and rattled to a tinny stop on somewhere on the floor, leaving the final snap—the sound and sensation and the numb spot it left like an acid-patch—to echo and settle on his suddenly exposed body.

All for the greater good: neutrality.

_We're gonna have a Pit of a time together, partner._

Lockdown powered the tool down and disarmed the stasis-cuffs.

"That's it. You're off the map, kid."

Drawing his shaking limbs free, Prowl shuddered in the cold dark and curled up into a ball, servos clenching over the rough raw spot on his chest and the blank horror that seeped out of it like a poison. The bounty hunter left the 'bot to his betrayal and his new, empty existence, deftly and solemnly crushing the discarded sigil beneath his pede as he did so.

Souvenirs only made it harder: memories were enough.


	8. Undefined Devotion

A/N: I struggled with some technical aspects of this, but I really loved the story (and how they interact aaagghhh!). Hopefully it makes sense AND packs a punch :3

Also, forgive my Cybertronian-anatomy slips AND my technical fluff: I AM NOT A MECHANIC D: I ONLY DOES IT FOR THE ROBOT SEKZ DOOD. That said, enjoy!

And... review? :puppyface:

* * *

Undefined Devotion

* * *

After two megacycles of peaceful silence, the bridge door slid open and Lockdown stomped into his ship, howling at the top of his vocalizers with both servos wrapped around meaty, glowing guns.

"Slaggin' shaft-suckers. Slaggin' virused fried outdated fragged—mother-fra--we could be halfway to—damn it! Sonuva—"

Unruffled, Prowl glanced over his datapad and waited until his irate partner steamed out most of his anger and wound down into disconsolate snarls before he even thought about inquiring as to how the deal had gone—and even then, it still didn't seem like such a smart idea.

Lockdown had been called down to a warring planet for a bounty-negotiation. It was strange in two senses: he never haggled over tables by principle, always preferring com-screens for his own safety and convenience, and he and Prowl already been loitering around that planet for a good two weeks—doing the other side's dirty work. Normally, Lockdown would never venture into what was (technically, by transitive theory) enemy territory, but the money offer was too great to ignore, and he knew their motivation to _stop_ him and his pretty partner was considerable—the militant hiring side was smart, and with the right blue-prints had turned the bounty hunting team into a two-mech juggernaut. It was good work (and turned Prowl on like nobody's business, so he wasn't complaining).

Perhaps swayed by the sum, Lockdown didn't see anything _too_ strange in the victim side wanting to hire their services. It had happened before, after all: most knew dedicated neutrality when they saw it. Unfortunately, they'd also coaxed him down to the surface by lying about their communications system. All they had was frequency-link, and even that was choppy, so he had no choice but to descend. He did so armed to the wiring and bristling with mods, but it was still a gamble the bounty hunter detested taking.

Now, two megacycles later, he had returned, and Prowl had the feeling it had not gone well. Already looking for superficial wounds or organic smears, the ninjabot rose to his pedes.

"What happened?"

"Those little fraggers never had the cash," Lockdown snarled, ripping off his cloth covering and going to work on the hideous mods he'd strapped on for the occasion. "Fake out."

Prowl arched a brow.

"Ambush?"

Lockdown shook his head, just as stymied as the other mech.

"Never made a move. Just acted like they had oil-bubbles in their tubing until they chased me out. One of 'em looked familiar, too," he admitted gruffly, then bared his teeth. "Call me down there for nothin', you—"

He launched off into an entirely new and creative string of curses and began storming in and out of rooms, Moot protesting with tiny, melancholy sounds as her few slammable doors were slammed. More than losing the money, Prowl knew his partner hated taking a blow to the ego—hated compromising the street-wise religion of his methods and having it fall through on him. Eventually, Prowl lost interest in the segmented demolition strip-show Lockdown was waging on the inside of his ship, wrenching mods off and tossing them wherever he felt like it. He reclaimed his seat and returned to his datapad, where he was pleasantly researching the life forms on their current job-planet.

Nothing too sentient, however. That might have given him an actual idea who and what he was working for on the war-torn surface of Kelo 3, and as his stellar-cycles with the Undecided had taught him, bias—and guilt—wasn't an option.

Within a few cycles, the bridge was occupied again. Lockdown, stripped to his original, handsomely bulky exostructure, moved his rage parade to the console where he punched in some data-bank searches, still muttering and fuming.

Prowl frowned, watching his partner's sharp movements: while it may have been a glitch in his comparative reasoning code, the other mech seemed to be running a little hot, anger or no.

"Lockdown?"

"_What?_"

"Nothing," Prowl answered lightly, returning to his articles. Hot, indeed.

Then Lockdown began steadily decompressing. He was no longer striking the control panels, as ruffled as he was, and Moot let go of her invisible hairpin tension; Prowl felt her settle in, and did the same. Or, tried to.

"Kid?"

"Yes?" Prowl eyed him dryly over a fascinating excerpt on communal reat-swamp photosynthesis.

"Get me some coolant?"

The fact that it was a question was the only thing that made the half-order permissible. Still, the younger mech thought that Lockdown seemed to be… in an altered state of some kind, even though he was no longer yelling. There was something different about his rhythm, and Prowl sensed it as he fetched the cheap coolant and handed it to his partner with a frown—though that was more about the choice of drink than anything significant.

While Prowl had simple tastes, that didn't necessarily make them _cheap_. Lockdown preferred coolant as it used to be, before sanitation boards began to make stupid laws about what could and couldn't go into the stuff. He still got his from a backwater factory, but Prowl couldn't take the taste of it or the way it made him run. He only used organic coolant. The ninjabot watched his partner uncap the scuffed-up jug and throw it back, listening to the heavy, acidic liquid slopping down his tubing with a slight grimace.

"That's mostly inerts, you know," Prowl said uncomfortably. "And Primus-knows what else."

"Did I ask you?" Lockdown growled as soon as he'd capped it, tossing the drained container to the side. Some of the poisonously colored substance spattered on his barbaric back in the process, and Prowl's visor widened as the wet spots immediately evaporated with a thin sizzle. Not standard. He cleared his vocals.

"Are you running smoothly?" Prowl asked as solicitously as he could, glancing up into his partner's white face. The younger mech half expected him to snarl again. Instead, Lockdown ran a servo along his thick neck as though feeling for something, then rattled his head with an irritated sound.

"I guess. Just feel a little green around the vents…"

"It's probably just disappointment," the ninjabot said wryly, moving to pick up the empty jug—just so he could recycle it, of course. "That was a lot of money."

Lockdown smirked.

"Maybe."

As Moot took off into space, _away_ from damned Kelo 3, all was to return to normal… with slight hitches. Prowl, once more curled in his chair with his information fix, which was roving blindly for a connection, kept an optic and an auditory unit tuned to Lockdown as the bounty hunter ponderously fiddled with the ship's stats. A few times, he thought he heard the other mech aspirating roughly, but nothing seemed amiss when he looked up. Short and simple, Prowl didn't feel right about seeing that coolant evaporate off of him, and was determined to stay alert.

His diligence was disappointingly rewarded. Prowl heard it before he saw it: the ship was suddenly filled with an uneasy silence, a _stilling_ of something healthy and measured. He looked up, servos hooked around his pad, and saw Lockdown suspended in a swaying vertical position for approximately three nanokliks--then the burly mech he called a partner crashed to his knees and plowed into Moot's blinking control panels with an echoing slam.

"Oh slag," he huffed thickly, face crushed against the wall.

Prowl vaulted out of his chair and sprinted to his side, immediately securing his servos around the other's flanks—then snatching them away. Lockdown's black chassis was scalding.

"You're—"

"Hot as a sun. I know," he groaned. The bounty hunter fought to gain control of himself on several invisible levels, looking Prowl blearily in the face when the ninjabot kneeled at his shoulder.

"Don't let me go into stasis," he muttered, red optics rolling, half-shuttered.

"Why?" Prowl demanded, sensors coldly piqued in something like terror.

"'Cos there won't be anything left to reboot if I do," he answered grimly, snagging hold of the control panel and trying to force himself up, shaking head to pede. Prowl caught him from behind, pushing the incredibly heavy bounty hunter up and gritting his teeth against the boiling temperature that seemed to have spread to his back as well. Heat was rolling off every inch of him, gusting over Prowl's own plating like an open threat.

"Have you--had this before?"

"No, but I've seen plenty of 'bots die from it," Lockdown growled. "Just don't let me go under, kid."

Prowl hid fear well. In times of crisis he proved to be coldly efficient, taking and executing directions with startling speed and nearly preempting Lockdown's faltering orders: most of which consisted of dragging him to his room and heaving him flat on his berth because the ability to move at length, the hunter knew through experience, would soon leave him. Ambulatory impulses weren't considered a priority when the systems that controlled them were practically withering.

While Prowl ran back for more coolant, Lockdown glared up at the ceiling (the act of _glaring_ rather than looking seemed more involved, more awake, and he needed to stay online--) and cursed his own stupidity, feeling the calculated sluggishness crawl up his systems.

_Slag. He downed me, too_, he thought, the mess of sensations and dripping, somnolent urges condensing into one ugly realization. He turned and rammed his clenched servo into the nearby wall, frustration hardening underneath the pulsing heat.

"_Rat-bastard_."

This, he knew, was one nasty bug. It was a nanovirus that generated unbearable heat in the proper mechanical, carbon-dioxide-laden environment: real fast and real useful for wiping out anything with delicate wiring. Active system immunity (which relied on technical sentience) was the only thing keeping it from turning him into a slagging fusion core and frying his systems straight off his innards. If he went into stasis, he'd be overrun and unsalvageable in a matter of megacycles. Dead.

And then—_then_--he'd been slipped a downer. It was a clean one, too: a hack made to shut down all alert systems, sending false chemical-electronic signals to the receptors that usually handled emergency stasis. Under normal conditions it was easy enough to stay awake through the discomfort of the virus, but he was going down fast and heavy because his body was convinced it was saving him from some irreparable wound. Whoever this was, they'd been thorough. Must've pissed them off awful bad. That explained why they lured him down, but how did they _do_ it? Lockdown couldn't even remember a point where any of the flesh-sacks had been within three meters of him, much less hovering over an orifice with a syringe.

Still, he tried to place that one guy's face. It refused to leave him alone, and that was never good. Primus, why did he go down there? He turned his head as Prowl returned shortly with gloves and a large jug of coolant (and some energon just in case, the prepared little 'bot).

"Y'don't need the gloves. S'not contagious," Lockdown mumbled and Prowl let them drop, moving up to inspect his chest. At the first touch, Prowl's normally inexpressive face fell: the bounty hunter was up a good ten degrees already. Before he could say anything (or before Lockdown could complain about the _organic_ coolant he'd brought, even though it was better for him) Lockdown jerked, optics widening.

"Wait—check my side heel-strut," he ordered Prowl, twisting to point with his left servo. "Right underneath the secondary plating, black section."

Confused but obedient, Prowl followed the instructions, running his digits along Lockdown's supremely scratched plating until his sensitive dermaplating snagged on something.

"There's… a fracture," he murmured hesitantly, peering at the deep, painful-looking crevice. The mech's exostructure had been soundly penetrated with a serrated weapon, it seemed, and the color was peeled away from it as though chemically stripped.

"Fraggin--that's how he did it."

There was no victory in the revelation. Lockdown's vocals were thick and almost miserable: something was fast overtaking him. Prowl's questioning silence at his pedes bade him twist and mutter:

"Dead-zone. All my local physical sensors are offline in that area, have been for a century. Bad patch job, solder dripped on my bare wires. Never thought to fix it." The bounty hunter snorted and slammed his elbow into the berth, simply looking for ringing physical contact to jar his systems back to attention: pain was both effective and readily available. "He fraggin' injected me. Slag. How did he _know_ that?"

Prowl moved to stand beside his supine partner, placing his servos on the edge of the berth and clenching it. Lockdown aspirated slowly, and the air he vented was as hot as a sun-gust.

"Who can we go to?" Prowl asked quietly, anxiousness soaking his vocals.

Lockdown turned towards his partner, rank condensation sizzling off his dermaplating as fast as it appeared, and laughed in his face. It was an ugly, choking sound, but filled with genuine amusement. Stunned, Prowl's first reaction was true anger—perhaps even an urge to strike Lockdown and snap him out of his guffawing glitch and down to the serious issue of _saving himself_—but then the ninjabot realized that the error lay with him. What he had asked was… hopelessly naïve, and he knew it now.

The bounty hunter was truly alone: he had no social infrastructure and no one to turn to in times of need. He was eternally and unconditionally for hire, which meant the only people who counted him as a friend were the people with enough money to override a hit on themselves, and hire the hunter afresh to fetch the person who ordered the hit. Otherwise, everyone was fair game. That treacherous neutrality obviously unnerved a lot of people, and many would celebrate at having him go offline—or conveniently find themselves unable to treat him if sick. It was too easy, and it was the only power his would-be victims had.

By this definition, Megatron was a friend. Prowl, the fact of the other mech's often perilous existence cold in his gut, shook his head and stared at him fiercely. After a few gulps of coolant (and a disgusted face), Lockdown began to speak haltingly.

"There's a medibot. Damn good one—usually hangs around that one galaxy. Ren one. Treats anybody for the money."

The mech was much like himself: drifters only fit well with other drifters, always forced to meet on the fringes of organized society.

"Usually?" Prowl repeated severely, visor wide. "What do we do if he's not there?"

Lockdown chuckled and regarded him hazily, optics dim in the silky heat-waves rising from his plating.

"Then you'll have your servos full keeping me online for Primus-knows how long," he whispered. He put the jug aside and looked up at the ceiling, blowing more painfully hot air through his chafed vents. "Slag, I hope you're good at making loud noises."

* * *

Time passed slowly.

After Prowl quickly entered in Lockdown's given coordinates on Moot's autopilot systems–she followed his instructions pristinely but her nervousness vibrated through her cool insides, sensing something was amiss in her silent, dark-plated friend—he returned to keep watch over his partner. Lockdown lay flat on his bare berth, coughing every so often. His ventilation systems convulsed from the lack of moisture, finer operations running dry and ragged from the heat the nanovirus generated; Prowl was ready at hand to give him coolant, just to keep him damp.

Prowl nearly doubted his ability to keep Lockdown awake. The mech was so _large_, surely his foreign-tech stasis-systems would be just as immovable. For all his technique, Prowl might just turn out to be an insecticon on a windshield, but damned if he wouldn't exhaust himself trying.

Lockdown was fading, that was certain, but he was still conscious. All his movements, even the flick of his servo to gesture for coolant or a temperature update, were syrupy and unsure. Loose, when every move Lockdown ever made was precise and powerful, or lazy and powerful: Prowl grit his teeth. After a while of it, the bounty hunter let his head fall limply to the right and came face to face with Prowl staring at him intently (insanely) at the very edge of his berth. Hovering like a predacon.

"You're makin'… me nervous and I'm the one crashing," he rasped flatly.

The stiff little kid didn't smile. His visor was still locked on him, immovable and bright. Lockdown gave the motor-deprived equivalent of a shrug and let his head fall back again, optics shuttering slowly…

"Lockdown. _Lockdown_," Prowl snapped.

The older mech jerked awake, grimacing, then faded again the moment he touched the cool, welcoming berth. Stifling a frustrated noise, Prowl leapt onto the raised platform and straddled his partner, swiftly pounding on his scalding chassis with his fists. The blows echoed oddly, and Lockdown's consciousness wavered as he reached a fuzzy, incomplete state, open optics more an excuse than a sign of alertness. Optionless, Prowl slapped him fiercely across the face.

Lockdown jerked like a roused lion, snarling, then realized—in a blurry series of self-checks--that he'd been falling into stasis. He rattled his head. The fact that Prowl was tautly perched on his abdomen didn't seem to make it past his sensors. He coughed once, running a servo across his slack facial plating and muttering:

"Primus, take it easy…"

When he lost consciousness almost immediately after, Prowl snatched a nearby stinger-mod, turned it to high power and rammed it into deep into Lockdown's neck in one fluid motion. Electricity vomited from the gouge, lighting the dark room: the bounty hunter bucked up and roared in hot pain, both servos blindly shooting up and locking around Prowl's throat.

"_I said take it easy_," he seethed, squeezing as hard as his singed tensors would allow. Scrambled with the acidic pain, it took him a few nanokliks to truly realize what was going on: the 'mod in the kid's grip, or the intent way Prowl was looking at him over his shaking servos, pretty mouth cracked in a pained but silent grimace. The heat in his body. The last two megacycles?

His servos came unlocked with a wheeze of gears. Prowl exhaled, systems churning back into motion, and Lockdown let his numb servos drop down the smaller mech's front, aspirating haltingly. The anger and the pain were keeping him awake. Prowl knew that. He needed to stay operational, and Prowl was making sure he did. Whatever had to be done: practical, practical little machine.

"I'm gonna kill you when this is over. I'm gonna _kill_ you when this is over," Lockdown finally huffed to himself, twisting half-heartedly against his berth and the light-weight (if sadistic) 'bot on his chest, neck saturated with a raw ache. The threat wasn't without its internal smile: Prowl was being just as brutally efficient as he'd be in the same situation. Not pulling punches. Kid was learning.

After a moment, Lockdown twisted to look up at his partner, handsome mouth twitching into a ragged half-smirk.

"Are you… sure you're not enjoyin' this a little more'n… you should be?"

"Your exostructure is too thick to make gentle reminders or coaxing an option," Prowl answered dryly. Lockdown chuckled, venting most of his energy into keeping his optics unshuttered and lit.

"Best trait," he slurred proudly. Prowl studied him with a growing frown, reaching down to feel the mech's thick (now scorched) throat and shaking his head when Lockdown glared at him.

"How do you feel?"

"Like some punk just pegged me in the neck with a shocker and… told me it was for my own good."

"So your pride hurts," Prowl surmised softly, and they both smiled. Prowl busied himself with finding the precious coolant and uncapping it, siphoning a few gulps past his partner's lip-plating; Lockdown was so drugged that he didn't bother to protest the nannying. The liquid drop in temperature felt like a cold servo to his neck. Almost comforting enough to make him offline his optics.

The ninjabot retreated to his oil-barrel chair, swinging off the berth but still remaining in physical contact with Lockdown at all times by way of a firm servo on his arm. He leaned forward to speak directly into the other mech's audio units.

"I'll keep watch. You _must_ remain online: if you feel yourself drifting, call out."

Lockdown nodded drowsily, watching the gold and black smudge go about his strangely stationary life-saving business.

"Yeah, gotta stay… huh. Otherwise you'd… be fragged, huh?"

"Life wouldn't be half as interesting," Prowl said oddly, regarding his partner intently. Lockdown grumbled and wheezed and tried his best not to die.

* * *

A liquid number of mega-cycles later, Lockdown rebooted.

Already, that fact was enough for him: it meant that, cumulatively, it'd been a successful day.

Still struck blank by stasis, he reached around inside himself, thinking and prodding. Everything seemed to be in order, and about a hundred degrees cooler. He tested his motor systems with little sparks—little suggestions--until he was certain he could sit up, which he did with a muffled noise of discomfort. A little slow on the go, yes, but he could move.

He booted up his optics, unmoved by the hideous farce of a medical bay laid to all four sides of him. Messy as a disposal planet, but sanitary, he knew. He'd been there a few times before—always after exceedingly stupid decisions, mind.

"Rebooty-booty, rise and prime."

Lockdown looked lazily over his spiked shoulder: the snicker came from the corner of the cluttered room, where a sparse-looking mech—the exiled Medibot—was fixing him with an eager gaze. Lockdown yawned and stretched, then set to tugging on his limbs, working the heat-induced stiffness out of his normally springy flexors and tensors. As soon as Tipper ran a quick system check on him, a casual exit seemed out of the question: the second the light flashed green, the orange-plated mech (whose personality programming consisted of a charming concoction of greed, lechery and whining—though Lockdown could only hold him at fault for the last one) practically assaulted him with words.

"Alright, where'd you get him?" Tipper demanded, flicking the checker away and tossing it into the tool-littered cesspool of his bay.

"W… huh?" Lockdown grumbled thickly. He scrunched his face up and swallowed forcibly. His vocals… were clogged. Along with everything else, apparently.

The Medibot huffed.

"Your new toy," he whined, blearily magnified optics straying to the exit—where Lockdown slowly reasoned Prowl was waiting, although he didn't make the connection. "Card game? Reprogrammed pleasure model? I gotta know. I mean, he's beautifully docile: what inhibitor mods? Behavioral blocks? Who'd you go to, I can't even see the scars--"

"Oh," the bounty hunter grunted. Tipper's flushed ramblings went in one audio unit and out the other, but he was talking about Prowl. Yeah, Prowl. He squinted. "He… uh, came t'me."

Tipper stopped thrashing around his cluttered tables and froze, staring at Lockdown in disbelief.

"He _came_ to you? As in… he's with you _willingly_?"

"Got him out of a tight spot on a primal little planet a decade or so ago," Lockdown supplied, waving a servo. "S'been with me ever since."

"…No rewrite, no blackmail? Not a single hack? _Slag_, how'd you pull that off?" Tipper demanded, antennae wiggling furiously as his reaction jerked between impressed and _scandalized_. He faced the bounty hunter dead on with his green optics ballooning under his triple-layered, thick-as-icing magnifiers, slim, finicky servos gesturing at the exit door. "The kid wouldn't _leave you_ 'till your internal temp was flirting with thirty four! You were down for megacycles: he could've taken off with your ship!"

Lockdown, testing his limbs again, spared a grudging thought that direction.

"Yeah. He could've. Moot _likes_ him," he grumbled nastily to himself, as though it left a bad taste in his mouth.

"That's statistically unfeasible. How's a 'bot like you get _devotion_ without coding it in?" The exiled medibot half-pouted, turning to kick a few gizmos out of his way. While Lockdown thoroughly detested whiners (and usually knocked them unconscious on sight), and the mech's other barrage of demands were half-insulting, but that particular question somehow… pleased him.

"Y'cant try to hard, I guess," he answered with a lazy smile. "I had somethin' he liked, and I liked everything he had."

He hadn't thought about it in eons, but… he had to give himself a pat on the aft. The whole thing had really pulled together. He'd had his doubts, but after he got the punk away from that little vegetation-ball, the way he and Prowl meshed was more than handsome. It was startling, how genuinely good life was, and how naturally the kid lived with him; how much Lockdown liked having him around.

In fact, he'd have to say… these were some of the best times of his function, in one way or another. Certainly some of the most expensive (he asked the kid about five times to throw the damned caps away but he kept refusing), but the best.

Of course, _devotion_ wasn't involved. Devotion was too instinctual and blind: buddy-buddy or no, he and Prowl functioned on a professional level. In striving so hard to keep Lockdown online, his partner was plainly protecting a lucrative business investment. They were purely professional by principle--or, at the least, Lockdown would remain self-convinced of it as long as he was able.

"Yeah, everything's easy for you," Tipper bleated sourly, pausing to place a deadly-looking gimmick onto a bit of cockeyed shelving before sighing. "Slag, I want one. What a catch."

"He's an efficient little bastard. Nice to have around." Lockdown mused for a moment, a lecherous smile warming his face. "Doesn't realize how pretty he is, I think."

"Never let 'em know, or else they'll have your nuts and bolts in a vice," the medibot chuckled. He busied himself just enough to turn his back, stalling, then asked smoothly:

"Good 'face?"

Tipper had a penchant for collecting impressionable, down-and-out 'bots and using them for all they were worth: knowing the context, the sly question was too invasive. The idea of the mech _picturing_ Prowl in any way insulted Lockdown down to his girders. It wasn't a _protective_ urge, no. The kid would tear Tipper apart if the wanton malfunction approached him, but the implication of Prowl—efficient, beautifully skilled Prowl who moved like a panther sculpted of whispers and struck like a nightmare—as nothing but a berth-warmer ticked him off. He wasn't used to getting riled up about another mech's 'honor', but that didn't stop him from setting the score straight.

He'd expect the same, of course.

"Kid ain't a toy. He's my partner," Lockdown responded darkly. Tipper twitched away, observant enough to know when his slick inquiries landed on sore pedes, and reapplied himself to his rudimentary clean-up.

Shortly after, however, the bounty hunter smirked. His chivalrous streak was weak from lack of use. Even if he respected the ninjabot with all he had—and he did—Prowl _wasn't there_, so he had to indulge in one of the finer social exercises between dominant mechs: bragging. Loosening up, Lockdown popped his neck supports nonchalantly.

"But yeah," he began, slow and casual. "More than a good 'face. Makes pleasure models seem like bags of bolts: kid lights up like a dwarf star. Eager as Pit, too."

He waited until Tipper turned around to blast him with a proud, naturally honest grin.

"Hardly can recharge these days."

The medibot exploded with an incredibly jealous, seething sound, then honestly set about cleaning the area as Lockdown rose to his working pedes and chuckled to himself, stretching his cool, restored body from side to side. Yes, it was a good day.

The gingerly affectionate, proud feeling he had for Prowl nearly suffered a fatal blow, however, when Tipper showed him the bill. The idiot kid hadn't talked price first, which led the scambot to quote his own _stupidly_ high robbery of a fee. Being alive was a non-issue if his account had been drained! Prowl was simply so anxious about fixing him that he hadn't considered the cooler details of the transaction: he had been very, very worried, but that didn't stop Lockdown from yelling at him for fifteen cycles with his horrible clotted vocalizer (clogged from the flushing procedure and the dead nanites) then stomping back off to the ship.

Call him an objective mech-sicle, but he preferred 'devotion' when it didn't cost him an arm and a leg. If only he'd used his processor! Prowl's glowing expression when he saw him erect and cool was worth more than a few credits, sure, but it only took the tip off the debt he'd swallowed into his scraped and restored chassis and he still shot the ninjabot dirty glares when he was sure the other was looking. He was pissed, and he stayed pissed for solar-cycles.

Still, monetary stupidity aside, Lockdown figured he'd keep the kid. After all these stellar-cycles... 'bot got a little attached to someone who worked so hard to keep him alive, even if he didn't move to confuse and qualify the motivation with words. For now, 'devotion' worked; Lockdown didn't care to question the definition. He was simply content with the fact he was alive and Prowl was with him, and that they could keep living life in that slick way they were so known for.

Some sticky, unnervingly platonic concepts were better left unsaid.


	9. Threat

A/N: Heee-heee-heee. An OC in this one, forgive me.

...Do YOU think he deleted it, reader? Hmmm.

* * *

Threat

* * *

As practical as Lockdown was, maturity was often a foreign concept to him.

He'd been isolated for so long and was so utterly dedicated to himself that childish reactions were almost natural, despite the heavy base of rationality and cunning intelligence he had to operate from. Maturity implied the willing decision to suppress one's uglier emotions for the sake of basic accord, and Lockdown was no such punch-pulling creature. He lived as he damn well pleased, and he'd never had anyone around to tell him when he was being an impossible bastard—not that he would have cared enough to do anything about it. Then again, no one had ever hacked with anything but his pride before: _this feeling_ was beyond abnormal, but he knew enough about it to hate it on sight. Just because he'd banned a word from his vocabulary didn't make it any less potent when it finally struck, and, as he learned, denial didn't do a damn thing for it.

Especially if it arrived in the form of a weak little protofragger sporting a pathetic mess of paper-thin sophistication, vulnerability and freshly-activated stupidity who was making Prowl smile and _relax_ in a way the bounty hunter had simply never seen before—and, horror of horrors, they needed the little shaftsucker _alive_.

* * *

"This is ridiculous. I ain't a slaggin' escort-tram."

Lockdown fairly bristled with hostility, shifting his weight from pede to pede and scraping his hook along his thigh. Prowl didn't bother glancing at him, instead keeping his visor turned toward the scorched (but obviously high-priced) three-tiered building ahead of them.

"Moot can't run on your dissatisfaction," Prowl reminded him. "We need the money."

It had been enough of a battle getting the bounty hunter down to the planet's surface in the first place. When the call came in, only Prowl's intervention had kept Lockdown from shutting down the link in the other 'bot's face. An elite mech's ward (a social facsimile of a biological heir for Cybertronians) had been on vacation and 'foreign study' in a culturally vibrant planet when the local organics began to riot over something or other. Hopelessly cerebral as the inhabitants of Irte were, the area became a (monologue-laden) war zone in a matter of solar-cycles, and the elite mech didn't want his soft-plated ward stuck in the middle of it. He needed to be rescued.

Autobot or no, he somehow obtained Lockdown's frequency.

The whole thing went over as badly as possible. The fact that the refined mech _flinched_ when the bounty hunter's side of the transmission booted up, or glanced around nervously as though there _must_ have been some mistake—well, none of that impressed Lockdown very much. The words 'escort service' didn't either. If not for Prowl's seizure of the negotiations and their alarmingly low account numbers (the market had been dry lately, and there'd been a certain _incident_ with Prowl's idiocy and a medibot), he never would have taken the job—or rather, never would have moved aside and bit his vocal chip as the crafty little ninjabot settled on the projected price and requirements. Oh, and stomped on his pede as Lockdown made to sabotage the commlink with an old pair of wire-clippers.

So they had the job—the demeaning, excessive-measure farce of a rescue-run. Just because the promised sum was both glorious and sorely needed didn't mean he had to be happy about it. Lockdown the Undecided didn't play nanny, and their 'target' would know it by the end of the run.

Lockdown approached the villa first, hissing as some blathering, skinny little organics bolted underneath his legs and ran off to storm Primus-knew-what in the name of justice and intellectual free will. He slammed on the door with his fist. Both heard something crash inside, then some faint vocalizations, followed by what could only have been a dash up some stairs. Lockdown glared over his shoulder at Prowl, who nodded.

"Open up, kid," the bounty hunter called sullenly, hating every cycle of it. "My ship's runnin' hot and we're stallin' on you."

It took the mech a moment to respond: lured only by the sparkling auditory gem of Cybertronian vocals (as opposed to the guttural burbles of the romantic local populace, who really posed no threat to a mech—yet another reason the bounty hunter viewed the whole thing as pathetic), the young Autobot crept up to the upper-story window of the warm-colored stucco villa and peered out. When he saw Lockdown at his door, however, he screamed like a train whistle and slammed the shutters.

Great start.

While the bounty hunter should have expected it, it was a monumental task trying to coax him out. Their 'target' was a weak-strutted coward, and Lockdown didn't exactly make an earnest attempt at soothing him or convincing him of their altruistic mission: he settled for brittle orders and half-threats, chucking verbal bombs up at the closed window. Even when informed of the transaction, the ward absolutely refused to go anywhere with him, wailing through the shutters and crashing around his abode in a panic. Finally, after several back-and-forths that gave him a chance to stew in his humiliating situation, Lockdown threw his servo (and hook) up and snarled:

"_Fine_, rust in there, ya little protofragger! Hope the organics gut you and convert you into a scooter!"

No wonder the youngling was frightened. The bounty hunter looked like he could have bitten through a metal hull as he stomped back towards Prowl; he would have surely kept going until he reached Moot and drove her far into the reaches of deep space, but his partner stayed him with a neutral but firm servo to his front. Fuming head to pede, Lockdown vented hot air, glaring at Prowl as he stepped up toward the window. Stilling himself, the ninjabot cleared his vocals.

"Sir, it's our duty to make sure you get to your destination safely, and we will complete it as per Tinus' guidelines," he said clearly, smooth vocals absolutely _saturated_ with delicate politeness. "Neither of us will harm you. My partner is a little vexed from the long trip, but he's incredibly proficient at what he does. Please come down and we can be on our way."

The shutters stayed shut so long Prowl wasn't sure if he'd been heard. Then, finally, they cracked open, and the mech's wide blue optics glowed out of the dark, rich interior. Line of sight flinching nervously past Lockdown, he found slim, gold-trimmed Prowl. He _looked_ for a ridiculously long while, then poked his head out, rounded white plating shining in the clean light from the bomb-spared gas-lamps.

"Who… are you?" The kid called out faintly.

"My name is Prowl," the ninjabot offered—a toying hint of warmth in the sentence. Very convincing. Prowl, smiling slightly, raised a servo to the window. "I'm here to help you. Would you please come down?"

If Lockdown didn't know any better, he would've said the kid shook like a leaf (or an unsecured fan-pin) and _blushed_. Whatever the case, Anicon nodded soundlessly and sunk back into his lush organic villa (obviously the best his loaded elite warder could afford), dissolving into a mismatched mess of crashes and high-pitched exclamations as he made his way to the door. Once he was out of sight, Lockdown, grudgingly impressed by the kid's style, leaned close to Prowl's temporal plating and breathed:

"You're a real charmer when you wanna be, aren't you?"

"As are you," Prowl returned wryly, throwing his partner an almost sultry glance. "You just aren't making the effort."

"Can't argue with that," Lockdown grunted, a nonplussed expression settling on his tattooed facial plating as they waited for the kid to come out.

Even before they entered the ship, Anicon refused to be anywhere near Lockdown. This was only natural (and a fine example of survival-programming), but it also left him to cling to Prowl like the ninjabot was a life-support apparatus, skittering in his shadow with a shy affectation and even grasping for his arm when Moot nearly closed a door on him with a suspicious sound. Prowl accepted the new dynamic with his impartial calmness, and tried to offer the youngling small bits of comfort with words and light smiles, which Anicon took eagerly.

Lockdown was fine with the situation (or as fine as he could be while grinding his teeth and swallowing his dignity) and went about his business of programming the energon-conserving rate of flight to the little 'bot's home world, just relieved that _he_ didn't have to amuse the silver-spooned soft-plated shaft-sucker… until they started _talking_.

First of all, the bounty hunter was still surprised that Prowl had mustered the loquaciousness to call Anicon down out of his gilded tower in the first place: it was something of an event to receive more than three words at a time from the ninjabot. So when their passenger started dropping the proverbial 'conversation' hankie, Lockdown nearly rolled his optics. It was a nervous, limp-jacked way of wasting time, and he had no doubt his partner would do nothing but nod and let the kid yammer on until he'd talked himself into stasis.

But Prowl _responded_. After the first few, halting inquiries, Prowl warmed under the dribble, and the soft interest in his vocals downright stunned Lockdown—and not in a good way.

Anicon was incredibly intelligent. The young mech was a budding organic scientist and a soft academic, admittedly, but his processor was always warm and brimming with thoughts. Once settled and face to face with open-minded Prowl, he was a well-spoken well of information and botanical fascinations, and not nearly as recently-activated as the ninjabot assumed: he was but a few decades short of Prowl's own length of function. No, naiveté aside, he wasn't an idiot. He was simply scared for his life back on Irte, and became a little stupid and short-circuitish when scared. He admitted so to the attentive ninjabot, who actually _chuckled_, and told him it was only naturally encoded.

They talked about nature. Each discussed different species of vegetation they'd come across; the differences between carnivorous and photosynthesizing specimens. The elite's ward was studying the flora on Irte in-between his cultural studies and passionately described all of his favorite finds to Prowl, who listened with a swelling contentedness and a dimmed visor—a sure sign he was caught up in his imagination.

They talked about philosophy. Anicon was considering a martial art to balance his set of skills, and Prowl spoke at length (proud, vibrant length) about his experiences with metalikato. The advantages of meditation—the joy it brought him, the expanded sense of techno-self. Anicon sucked it in like clean fuel, optics glowing a dazzling blue.

Lockdown's emotional state wasn't exactly a clean slate to begin with, but watching the whole thing only pissed him off more. He'd expected Prowl to _tolerate_ the brat—out of the two of them the younger mech was by far the most socially adjusted, or most adept at lying through his teeth in that pretty _cultured_ way—but to have him… enjoying the humiliating debacle made the hunter's mood plummet to rock bottom. He wasn't _allowed_ to, for Spark's sake, not while Lockdown suffered—though his dissatisfaction was becoming less and less about their pitifully easy rescue-run and more about the circus taking place behind his aft.

Yes, his partner and their 'hit' _conversed_, perched at the back of the red-lit bridge with crossed legs and open expressions. Knees brushing. They were absolutely sucked into one another, and absolutely making Lockdown's optics twitch with all of their periodic chuckles and thoughtful noises. This was an entirely different side of Prowl that he'd nearly forgotten about. This… flowing, intellectual creature was not the same one that called him partner, or smirked at him over an unconscious organic soldier before sprinting into the waiting darkness. _That_ attractive Prowl wouldn't be putting up with someone so pathetic… or staring at him like he wanted nothing more than to drag the brat into his Zen hotbox and interface his pretty little waxjob off to Fifillian's fifth symphony.

…Maybe that was a stretch. Taking the brat to his room would've been too personal, Lockdown knew, and was bitterly satisfied that Prowl had at least _that_ much solidarity in his logic-drive, even if the bounty hunter _hated_ having them on the bridge. Hated the obnoxious chemistry, the flow of goodwill and mutual interest. Still, he wanted both the little boltbags in sight.

Wasn't sure why.

Lockdown grimaced and off-lined his audio receptors, only to viciously boot them up a few cycles later when he caught Anicon putting a delicate servo on Prowl's knee. He told himself he was only curious in a professional way—watching the events unfold in his usual equal-opportunity detachment—but that well-known mindset had never made him grind his teeth quite so much.

Would've loved to pull a table-turn on him and hold the little slagger for ransom at the expense of his poor papabot. Maybe accidentally offline him in the process, _after_ getting the money. Would have to knock Prowl out first, though. Kid wouldn't let him do it. Yeah, knock them _both_ out at the same time, call up papabot, wager it out with a pair of wire-clippers behind his back then--

…Thinking about it too hard. It was not a good day.

Eventually, with Moot chugging along tiredly on autopilot and no need for a vulture-like vigilance at her controls, Lockdown became so sick of the situation that he stormed off to his room, seeking chilly respite from the cultured ebb and flow of Anicon and Prowl's intellectual exchange. The escape left him stranded in the boring box for three megacycles, which did _wonders_ for his mood, of course. Their destination and the speedy drop-off couldn't come quickly enough for him, but the cycles ticked by at their own sweet leisure until Moot beeped sullenly at him and began to land.

As they made the final exchange, approaching the _ridiculously_ large, well-lit, garden-rimmed dwelling that the punk called home, Lockdown stopped as soon as he could, letting Prowl walk Anicon to the door. Poor crankshaft would probably trip on a few _atoms_ and offline himself if left to his own fumbling devices, Lockdown snorted inwardly, and they needed that cash. As soon as Prowl terminated the drop-off call to Tinus, he turned to the brat and probably said goodbye, and Anicon scuffed his pedes and whipped up some shy elitist banter. Then—_then_—after only a brief touch on the arm, he turned to Prowl and embraced him, whispering something against his cheek.

Lockdown cranked his sensors up so high that feedback snarled and squeaked in his audio receptors.

The distance was too great. He didn't catch anything: the scene remained a soundless little puppet-show, and he glared as Prowl completed the embrace with his arms around the brat's waist, then pulled back with a soft, surprised look on his long face. Prowl nodded, thanked the other mech courteously, and Anicon ran off and slipped through his solid-copper front doors.

Prowl sauntered back to Lockdown's side, looking unbearably thoughtful.

"He offer you a job as a scrubber-bot for your good deed?" Lockdown asked scathingly. Prowl, visor still an absorbed shade of teal, shook his head.

"Just… a frequency."

As lightly as Prowl dropped it, it impacted with enough force to make Lockdown's jaw hit his knees. The ninjabot walked past him without a glance, mouth twitching into a small smile, and left his partner to stare as he strolled up Moot's boarding plank. Shaking himself, Lockdown rebooted and stiffly pursued his partner back to their soon-to-be restored and refueled (and _cleaned_) ship, every circuit snapping.

Somehow, the knowledge that thirty-seven-thousand shiny credits were now sitting pretty in their joint account after a minimal amount of effort on both their parts… didn't feel as satisfying as he'd thought it would.

* * *

The next few solar-cycles were an exercise in coping with erratic behavior.

Lockdown was just as efficient and _Lockdowny_ as ever, but his pattern had changed. When not storming past him or scrutinizing him suspiciously from across the room, his partner touched and groped Prowl constantly, gripping the ninjabot's slim waist while lounging at Moot's controls or wedging a semi-playful servo between his thrusters and rubbing away. While the large mech enjoyed physical contact (and its results) as a rule, Prowl knew where lecherous ceased and _domineering _began. With as close as he was hovering, it was as if the mech was forcibly claiming him—though why, Prowl didn't know. Even interfacing followed the trend: Lockdown downright _consumed_ him, leaving him steaming and aching with a loose chassis pin or three, and still never seemed to relax afterward.

Exhausted and befuddled, Prowl couldn't fathom the almost neurotic change in his confident partner—at least, not until he considered the only thing that had happened before it. Yes, their contracted rescue run had upset him on a professional level, but he wouldn't take that humiliation out on his partner. So the only other option that had to do with Prowl… was Anicon. Prowl thought about it.

Technically speaking, the young mech had invaded the bounty hunter's precious territory. He… fraternized with his partner and made a move to further their relations (though only Prowl knew in what fashion). With his animosity towards the youngling and the surge of possessive behavior afterward, the ninjabot could only conclude that… ridiculous as it was, that Lockdown felt _threatened_ by the invasion. And since Lockdown was impossible to intimidate and Anicon was downright pathetic next to him, it followed that the threat wasn't physical. It was mental. A mental or emotional threat: something Lockdown couldn't smash or shoot, and wasn't patient enough to solve with words.

When the ninjabot attempted to put his conclusion into terms that made sense with the bounty hunter, it yielded no result. There was only one word for what was happening to his partner, and even then it made him smirk in a confused fashion. It was too simple. Too… silly.

Lockdown the bounty hunter was jealous.

* * *

He waited until Lockdown had fondled his lower backstruts for at least four cycles until he said anything. It was an added bonus that the reclining bounty hunter took that passive opportunity to pinch and pat him purposefully, giving the ninjabot nothing if not _motivation_. Smiling thinly, Prowl turned to face his partner and prey, visor glowing a dirty teal.

"Do you… need something, Lockdown?"

He was hardly able to keep the amusement out of his vocals. Lockdown always liked that superior spark of his, but not when it made him feel like there was a mine under his aft. Startled, the burly mech looked up at Prowl, face immediately darkening.

"What?"

"Can I help you with anything? Can I give you… personal affirmation of some kind?" Prowl inquired, smiling in a terrifyingly understanding way that reeked of sly condescension. "Perhaps clear up a misconception."

Silence hung heavy and awkward in the bridge. Lockdown eyed him like he was crazy and, with that unwavering smile, he might've been.

"What the _Pit_ are you on about?" He grunted finally.

"Forgive my impetuousness, but after that mission with the Elite's ward—"

Prowl hid another small victory as Lockdown's frown deepened into a full-on grimace and he shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

"Mission? That was a fraggin' coolant-run."

"Yes, I realize. Pardon, but… after Anicon left us, you… judging from your responses then and now, and the development in our conduct, you seem… I mean no offense, but--for lack of a better word…"

The bounty hunter's lip plating curled, fed up with Prowl's uncharacteristic indirectness (and his _eloquent blather)_ and half-spooked by the whole situation. He raised a servo, growling:

"Just cough it—"

"Jealous."

Lockdown stopped. It was a full-system stop: Prowl couldn't even hear the hum of his core. His partner turned his head to stare at him, red optics thin and bright, truly searing through him with toothy offense—then erupted into a girder-shaking guffaw.

For the next three cycles, Lockdown absolutely killed himself laughing. At him. At Prowl. At the _idea_.

Prowl stood and accepted it, waiting patiently for his partner to finish. His placid expression did not waver, visor trained on Lockdown as he rolled in his chair—until his partner ceased to laugh far too abruptly and stood to grab Prowl's shoulder, jerking the other mech so they were face to face.

"_Don't get cocky_," Lockdown sneered sharply, glaring into his optics, then released him.

The bounty hunter stepped around his chair and stalked off awkwardly, retreating to his berthroom with a series of standoffish clicks and airlocks—as unnatural an act as he ever took, as his recharge station was his least favorite place on the ship. Prowl waited. Lockdown also seemed to realize this little slip in his façade after a handful of cycles, and exited a second later with his head held overtly high, decidedly _storming_ into his warehouse without looking at Prowl and slamming the door every bit of power he could muster.

When the frustrated sounds of power tools snarled and buzzed up through the closed door, Prowl couldn't help but rub his temple and chuckle to himself.

The bigger they were, the harder they fell. Internally.

* * *

That lightless equivalent of night in their free-formed space roaming life, Prowl approached Lockdown in his shop. His plan was too simple to truly be a plan, but he still executed it with admirable flair. Even when Prowl didn't bother to speak or excuse himself as he bit down on his partner's neck and dug his servos into his sensitive black flanks, Lockdown almost resisted him: the bounty hunter hesitated for a bare nanoklik, almost as though stung or unwilling to give into his treacherous partner's advances—his _sophisticated_ partner, who probably _preferred_ disembodied walking Elite processors over him.

It wasn't hard in the end, but the fact that it was _ever_ remotely difficult to coax the eternally hot-Sparked bounty hunter onto the floor with him (and in his favorite place nonetheless) still gave Prowl a quiet laugh. After they both rebooted, and Prowl had not moved to extricate himself from Lockdown's bulky weight in several cycles, the older mech finally seemed assured of something that had passed between them: most likely the simple fact that Prowl _liked him better._

Granted, it was something Prowl would have been just as content _telling_ him, but his partner would never, ever have wanted to hear it.

The boundaries of their double-layered communication were sharply drawn, and _verbalizing_ such a thing would have been beyond inappropriate even if drowning in it during an interface and the preceding dance of gestures and implications was a perfect remedy. His partner's standards were finicky and bizarre, Prowl knew, but Lockdown communicated solely through touch and sound and the ninjabot had become quite skilled in speaking the older mech's wordless language. Quite… happy to be so fluent, as well.

Thus soothed, the bounty hunter finally wound down, dark Spark pulsing contentedly in his relaxed chassis as they cooled on the floor of the mod-strewn shop. Once Lockdown realized Prowl's passive (though notably unapologetic) mood, however, it wasn't long until he began to push boundaries. Warm and pleased at their renewed dynamics, he bullied and knuckled the ninjabot, and Prowl bit back after a few cycles of it, provoked into a swift wrestling match that proved to be just as satisfying as what had come but half a megacycle before.

Prowl sparred with his possessive lion of a partner for a good while, the mess only coming to an end when the ninjabot caught hold of one of Lockdown's more dominant abdominal pressure points and forced him to surrender—pushing boundaries himself as he made the demands. Servos up, pedes perpendicular, flat on his backstruts. The other mech pointedly obeyed, chuckling like an earthquake.

Lockdown went silent when Prowl simply lowered himself to his partner's side after his solid victory, aspirating gently, but spoke up after a few cycles.

"What frequency did that brat give you?" Lockdown growled as neutrally as he could from behind Prowl's warm shoulder. Prowl tilted his chin, almost thinking about it—or pretending to.

"I don't know. I deleted it," he answered quietly. When Lockdown said nothing, Prowl shrugged and leaned back into his partner's still-toasty chest-plating, murmuring just archly enough: "Janitorial service doesn't excite me."

Lockdown rumbled in a brash, approving way and indirectly looped an arm around Prowl, crunching him closer. Rare and impulsive. Affectionate. Immature, yes, but honestly affectionate. Prowl smiled and rolled his optics behind his visor.

Lockdown didn't fare well against things he couldn't smash or kill, and sometimes—most times—it was better to simply put him out of his misery.


	10. Ultimate TurnOff

A/N: This is probably the most relationship-serious chapter, I guess. Hope I didn't stretch it too far, because Lockdown IS still rational, but you can get hella-close to someone after spending sixteen-some-odd years living and breathing next to them. Plus, as we know, Prowl is an endearing little ninja! AND Lockdown is still human. … Er, mechanical.

Lockdown feels the urge to meeeeerge. (Forgive me, Primus, but I laughed aloud when writing the prostitute bit. So freaking brutish!)

**To all readers:** Hi! I'm pleased as pink if you're reading this by itself, but I would also HIGHLY suggest reading 'Deadlocked' before you go any further. It is the (thwarted) beginning of Prowl and Lockdown's partnership—Partners is an AU 'what-if' sequel--and the content therein will be referenced _a lot_ in later chapters. Thank you!

* * *

Ultimate Turn-off

* * *

Every relationship had its tug and shove with berthroom rhythm, even if the bounty-hunting team had a _system_—not a relationship.

Normally, Lockdown did the chasing. Prowl came willingly, perhaps smiling slightly, but very rarely did he instigate… mostly because his dignity was too valuable (Lockdown took the fluid out of him for it) and the bounty hunter always preempted _any_ possible urges he might have had with his own eternally-ready smirk. No, their rhythm came easily and stayed standard: Lockdown chased and quick little Prowl slowed down just enough to be caught and make the ritual satisfying at the same time.

After hard, oil-spattered hunts, however, the kid didn't dodge or sprint away. He turned around and, visor gleaming, _pursued_.

The hard-won violence and the sweet success aroused him; got his systems running so tight that the smallest scratch or innuendo would set him off and take his engines roaring and spitting so hard he vibrated. He was a mean little machine and a practical unstoppable force, all of his devious circuitry and skill programs running just as high and clean as his sex-drive. He tricked and lured and attacked. Lockdown wasn't used to being physically jumped and forced into a wall by such a lightweight model, but he wasn't averse to it—especially with the lusty way Prowl looked at him and the way they _fought_ for dominance. His partner took him on head-to-head, for the sheer love of it.

In that oil-lust, none of 'coy' Prowl's finiky little preferences mattered: the bounty hunter didn't have to be concerned with upsetting him. He _let go_, pulling dirty tricks and relishing when Prowl dealt him the same with a sharp grin. They fell and fought and thrashed where they were, and had a Pit of a time. _This_ was what Lockdown had seen in him that first time on Earth: the ninjabot's throbbing ego, his toothy want of dominance and his willingness to be dangerously powerful. Their sessions were always jarringly physical, but this was an all-out personal war, and it was _damn_ good.

Afterwards, Prowl actually stayed with him. Maybe he was exhausted; maybe he felt vulnerable after such a draining and… unnaturally consuming rush of brutality, and wanted to be near someone. Maybe Lockdown grounded him and made his reserved side return, or he felt closer to the bounty hunter than usual and simply _wanted_ to stay.

Whatever the case, Prowl rebooted and made no move to leave. He dozed comfortably in the crook of Lockdown's steaming green body, seeming to drink in their dissipating vapor and collective heat with a contented purr of his engines. Blissfully primal and unaware, knowing the hunt to be well-done and over with, with rewards on the way. The silent sentimentality wasn't something that Lockdown necessarily wanted, but he had to admit it was nice having the little machine there to pet and joke at. It was especially nice not to have the often stuck-up ninjabot exit his room like he couldn't wait to scrub himself clean, sullied processor and scuffed plating and all.

But it was in these not-necessary-but-grudgingly-nice moments that Lockdown started thinking outside his cherished box of objectivism.

A whispering bit of glitched code in the back of his processor said that, in untold eons, Prowl was the only one he'd ever found who was worthy of being his partner. Partner had long been a dirty word for him: a practical impossibility, a compromise and a liability. Someone to share with? No, Lockdown didn't share. He _earned_ and kept everything. His independent-streak was a galaxy wide and a war deep: he didn't need anybody, but it wasn't that whiny, defensive type of solitude.

Quite literally, he had no need of anyone. He was a self-contained machine, efficient and vicious, feeding on ever-present conflicts among the stars and keeping himself happy. Damn, damn good life. No one to answer to but himself.

Then Prowl had fallen into his lap, and he decided to take a plunge or three. The coy ninjabot had called him partner first, that very first time he snuck onto Lockdown's ship, and the idea simply stuck until he… convinced the kid to follow through in a more permanent joint venture. The fact Lockdown had adapted so quickly to their 'partnership' after so long alone perturbed him, and that same insidious line of code insisted that he'd never find anyone else this _good_ on this many levels: not only individually, but in relation to him. He and the weird little 'bot worked together in the domestic sense, whereas most partnerships were frigid, dispute-riddled and had convenience as their only lifeblood. It was a compelling, uncomfortable thought, but a ready one after sixteen stellar-cycles of coexisting with the wry ninjabot.

It almost made him want to… be closer with Prowl.

Almost like a merge. Maybe.

It wasn't a waking thought, to be sure. Primus, no; _Pit_ no. It wasn't something that lingered with him, because when he had all his faculties the thought was beyond idiotic. No, it hit him when he was vulnerable: mostly when he was crouched over the moaning kid, bathed in the pulsating phosphorescence of their restrained Sparks with all the power in his grip and the memory of a clean, beautiful hunt in his core. It was a dumb, primal _urge_, not a well-meditated desire, and made merging seem like less of a damaging commitment than it was.

Interfacing? Yeah, sure, they'd played 'hide the Spark' before, but the two had never actually _merged_—never actually let their Sparks spill out of their chambers and fuse into one another down to their hungry cores. It was more like a brush of their eager energies, or a lick on the surface to bring their trapped Sparks underneath to a tortured frequency and a quivering overload. Every interface, he cracked Prowl's heaving chassis a bit, and that was that—and Primus, it was nothing to backfire at. But it had given him a taste of the kid's _center_, and now his greedy, hulking body wanted more.

He was gingerly addicted to the ninjabot after all these stellar-cycles, though he spent most of his time convincing himself he wasn't.

The act wasn't a curiosity, though: it wasn't as though he was dying to try it for the first time. He knew what it was like, merging. Bonding. Lockdown had merged once and only once in his younger (idiot) years, and it was no romantic endeavor. He'd done it with a whore and only because he wanted to. She hadn't even had a say in it.

It started as a normal business exchange, but Lockdown, always known for wanting more than his fair share, had brought it to another level. He'd overpowered the bite-sized femme and simply let his roaring Spark go. He'd wanted to experience it, so he did. It was easy enough: she was smaller than him and he'd half-bullied her out of wearing her chamber-shield in the first place (he could be a charming devil) so he could _feel_ her more. The sensation was beyond belief, even with the model screaming like the dickens.

It was a full-system completion. It was the hardest overload he'd ever had and made him feel like he'd off-lined and gone to the Well—if the hallowed Well was full of nothing but rattling, all-consuming pleasure, liquefying and crystallizing in spurts so hard they brought him to convulsions.

She recovered faster than he did (Pleasure-Models had a reset time of forty-seven and a half kliks for professional reasons) and when he rebooted, she was deep in the task of murdering him with an interfacing toy. It wasn't like he'd _scarred_ her, because Prostibots had a special virus-like program designed for wiping system-sync and Sparkmerge effects from their system, but he'd still broken her 3,720,957-customer streak of superficial interfacing and she was plenty pissed about that.

The second he'd disarmed and 'convinced' her not to kill him, she uploaded the neat little virus with a disgusted, invaded look on her face (already, his wasn't the cleanest Spark) and chased him out with a few heavy yet charmingly aerodynamic objects. A 'bot couldn't do that to a Model nowadays, or he'd at least be brought up in a court of law if so, but Lockdown had merged and he was satisfied. It was over: she wasn't involved with him in the slightest, because she'd purged him from her systems.

He, on the other hand, got his wish. Even after Lockdown exited the room, or the building or the planet, he could still _feel_ her.

The merge had certainly worked on _him_: his untouched systems were quick to sync, and he didn't realize for another megacycle that he'd bonded with the anonymous Pleasure Model on a small scale. Her consciousness and essence lurked in his processor like a whiny visitor, or a digit wedged in his audio receptors. After the first three months, he wished he could take an acid-bath to his databanks just to drive her out. Her banal thoughts and upsets plugged along inside of him, no matter how far away he flew: it took him fifty solid stellar-cycles to get rid of that one obnoxious prostibot. He regretted it, _Pit yes_--not the actual act but the sentient, invaded taste it left in him. That one night was among his least-favorite but most enlightening mistakes.

Lockdown may have seemed like a filthy and free pleasure seeker, and he _was_, but that sealed it for him. Merging was an intimate act—nothing to be messed with, as hot as it felt, because it compromised his independence and sanity. Got inside a 'bot faster than any rational feeling and struck like a virus. A vicious force of nature. He'd never do it again.

Then there was weird, silent Prowl, who made him _think_.

It wasn't as black and white a decision as many would assume. For several reasons, the traditional route to Sparkmerging was out of the question. First of all, he'd never show his Spark to his partner. It was a emotionally searing and implication-loaded ritual, obnoxiously intimate but not pleasurable: a preview of that you'd be getting out of the other mech once his Spark was molecule-deep in your own. He wanted to plunge his servos into Prowl's sweet, hot center until they burned away, but his own… he'd never consider that kind of unconditional vulnerability. He had too many secrets to keep in his line of work—they were just bits of information to him, but they'd become _secrets_ once Prowl saw them.

Unbearably dramatic. Hated it. Not an option.

So the fact remained that he still half-lusted to merge with Prowl, but didn't want to expose his Spark. Didn't want anything that came after, and didn't, above all, want to give him a chance to refuse. He respected the kid, and forcing it on him didn't sound like respect. But in those energon-soaked rushes, both mechs as high on brutal success as the intimacy, when Prowl actually hounded him with a feral grin and maneuvered him into walls and berths with his black and gold lightweight frame, mean little Spark gleaming—Primus, he wanted to take it out of him.

He wanted to let go, take in, own and taste him. No, he wanted to quit tasting and start gulping. Own the kid down to his Spark. Consume him.

In his haywire, distracted moments where the kid made him proud and toasty and affectionate, a part of him compromised: that part said that if it was going to be anybody, it'd be Prowl, and he might as well do it. Just let slip in the middle of interfacing before the kid could do anything about it, and that was that. Merge and sync with him, make it so he _couldn't_ really leave. Possessive, possessive. Part of him warmed to the idea of messing with the other's internals without even touching him, or sending sly little _feelings_ into Prowl's head: like a vastly more private comm-call, which he already loved to tug the ninjabot's wires with.

He had the creeping feeling Prowl would refuse if asked outright, and he didn't know how irrationally angry he'd be if the kid did it out of fear, or even what that _meant_ to him. He'd rather not think about it.

After all, he was abstaining out of common sense: the idea was too personal, too stupidly intimate—he didn't _want_ to know about Prowl's deep thoughts and regrets and annoying morals, much less have ghost copies of them in his own databanks--and Lockdown still maintained that their bond was professional. It was, of course: Prowl was just a hot model and a damn good 'face, and who was he not to take advantage of that? If they merged, or even Sparkbonded, there'd be no clean exit for their partnership. No… neutrality. No ability to cut and run.

Still, the idea of _being_ with the kid on that level--experiencing that hellishly awestruck sensation with a kindred Spark--brought up a host of uncomfortable possibilities.

Every time, Prowl trusted him to crack him just a little, and to keep his own Sparkchamber closed—perhaps relying not on _trust_ (because neither did, so they said) but on Lockdown's natural aversion to the sickeningly romantic idea of merging. Every time. How easy would it be just to open up on him and fold back that black chassis like a pair of double doors? Catch him off guard.

Yeah, it'd feel good, but then there'd be the sticky consequences of it. First, Prowl would probably hate him for it. Then there was the fact his head would no longer be his own: that a connection of unconditional vulnerability would open between them and deepen with subsequent merges. Not only would he have to suffer Prowl's sentience infused with in his own, the kid could see past his facades just as easily. Bluffing would be a thing of the past. His core advantage, that of withholding information, would be gone, and he'd be _tied_ to the little mech, and a bond like that would take centuries to fade. Would he ever irrationally give up everything he held dear just to _feel_ something?

Never. The whole thing was impossible, damaging and ridiculous, and he knew it. A regular self-contained frag. All in all, a stupid idea, but it still was a thorn in his side whenever he was crushed around his trembling partner and Prowl's silent unreal trust was dumb and drugging in the hot air and his virgin spark throbbed and, just for a second, he felt he loved the kid. A little. Enough. At all. Just for a second.

Then it was gone—or he drove it out of himself by mechanically catapulting them both into blank ecstasy.

Love was his ultimate turn-off.


	11. Choice

A/N: He's baaaaack! …I hope this isn't obnoxious D: The little mech is really quite sweet! …Hopeless and sickeningly naive, but sweet. (Admit it: you'd melt too if you could have Samurai Prowl's attentions!) AW, AND RIGHT AFTER LOCKDOWN HALF-ADMITTED HE LOVES PROWL. BAWW. Nice sense of timing, little ninjabot. (Much freaking love to Enolianslave, who gave me Lockdown's 'one with myself' line! She's a GENIUS.)

(PS: Please forgive Prowl's habit of analyzing everything. It's just what he DOES, and it makes writing for him a nasty, easily-boring ordeal. Also? Awkward love scene is awkward.)

* * *

Choice

* * *

Prowl did delete the frequency, but that never mattered much in the end.

It was a monotonous travel day on the ship, with Prowl stretched out in Moot's cool red silence while he sifted through the feeds of literature he had downloaded from their last planet. There was little to do on such long, dense trips but meditate and learn, and that suited the ninjabot wonderfully, even if the re-translated prose of Popemo's greatest authors was a little too choppy for his liking. Lockdown, conversely, was knocked out from a boredom-induced high-grade overcharge in the back of his shop and lay chill and still, his maintenance systems' conscientious whirring the only sign he was still operational.

He didn't do it as often as one would think, but the well-worn mech did have his vices.

Between one empty megacycle and another, the ship system comm-call came in on mute: Moot was kind enough to let sleeping dragons lie, but ever-vigilant (and now considerably prose-soaked) Prowl picked up on it. Setting his data-pad aside, he strolled into the bridge to seat himself in Lockdown's oversized chair, flipping the proper series of levers and knobs with a sleepy speed. Lockdown had been incredibly controlling about his calls at first (not trusting Prowl… more deeply than he currently didn't trust him) and made sure to take every one of them, but that didn't last long. Once he realized Prowl to be a cool secretary of sorts with _enough_ standard sense not to frag up basic business transactions—or at least figure-specific notes and a jotted down frequency—the bounty hunter loosened up on the reins and gladly retreated from one of his more obnoxious dealings with the outside world. Technically, Prowl screened his calls so he didn't have to talk with idiots. He hated idiots… and people in general.

For Prowl, life was better when Lockdown wasn't irritated. The system worked.

The screen flickered, warming up. Prowl had never been a flincher, adjusting quickly to the ridiculous variety of shady characters who called on his and Lockdown's equally shady services, but the lens-distorted face pushed curiously close to the freshly booted-up commscreen made him jerk in shock—just because it was so young, clean, unassuming and unexpectedly familiar.

"Anicon," he half-exclaimed, gaping at the pale young Autobot, then frowned. "How… did you get this frequency?"

Anicon's rounded face, which had lit up like a lamp upon sight of Prowl, flickered uncertainly.

"You… you don't look happy to see me," the younger mech gulped, optics gleaming in breathless apprehension. Prowl shook his head.

"Nothing of the sort—I'm simply concerned for you," the ninjabot clarified, briefly scanning the richy-decorated room behind the other mech. "Is everything alright?"

"Well, yes, why would—oh, no, no! I'm not in trouble!" Anicon laughed nervously—after all, they had been his rescue crew the last time. He smoothed his servo over his pert antennae, pulling a playful half-grimace. "Everything is fine. I'm just--I took it from Tinus. The, uh, the frequency. So I could… yes."

Prowl, regarding the commscreen's occupant doubtfully, waited for an explanation: his cool, functional silence caused Anicon to wilt away from the screen and heat up under his facial plating. His round blue optics strayed to the floor.

"It's just… you didn't call me."

"I've… this life is quite demanding," Prowl stammered after a moment, more perplexed than he'd been in stellar-cycles. His acquaintance wasn't making the least bit of sense and the ninjabot still hadn't recovered from the unexpected event of the call itself. Off balance, he felt forced to pull sentences out of thin air to respond to the other mech.

On top of that, Lockdown could reboot at any moment and walk in to see him communicating with Anicon—or, as it would appear, sneaking around under his olfactory receptors to shmooze with the coddled shaft-sucker—and while he didn't know exactly what the resulting scene would entail, it wouldn't be pleasant. It would also imply that he'd lied about deleting the child's frequency, and… whether it was taboo to Lockdown or not, trust was still important to Prowl, and he didn't want to offend whatever twisted derivative of half-confidence Lockdown nursed for him. The act of using their main frequency to call him was downright offensive and nearly exhibitionist. Lockdown would not be quick to forgive him for it, knowing his toothy loathing for the rich little mech.

And there was the fact, linked by that thought, that Anicon had foolishly risked citing their frequency—their _shared_ frequency—and having Lockdown boot up on the other end of the screen. Prowl nearly slapped his forehead, suddenly feeling as though he'd dodged a very large and very loud bullet. On the other end of the transmission, Anicon winced away again, cupid's-bow lips pressed tightly together.

"I expect so," he murmured pensively. He looked up, gleaming with ardency if not disappointment. "You're occupied. Should I call back?"

_Primus, no_, Prowl thought instantly. As awkward as it was, the most opportune time for such an exchange was while Lockdown was solidly knocked out in the back. Still perturbed, he shook his head and raised a servo as though grasping for words.

"I'm not busy at… the moment," Prowl managed curiously, watching the fluctuations on his almost-friend's face. There was something tense and self-conscious rattling around beneath Anicon's surface, banging into all the sensitive portions of his face and making him seem almost frightened. "What can I help you with?"

The young, white-plated mech (although he had never seen Anicon's altmode, he strongly suspected it to be a compact, rounded vehicle of sorts) looked up at him with a concentrated interest, smiling. The next nanoklik, however, he panicked in his small, pretty way again and fumbled for his next train of thought.

"I—I… you spoke about metallikato and—Tinus said he would search out a master, but I—perhaps it's better self-taught? Did you instruct yourself?"

"No. I had a master: everyone in the art must, as you cannot learn from yourself while your experiences are so limited," Prowl explained, rising from Lockdown's chair. "It is much more than rote data-internalization. You need someone to instruct you on the Path as a companion and a leader."

"Oh. I see," Anicon murmured. Once again, Prowl was plunged into dense confusion: the Autobot looked truly disappointed, as though he had just been told off instead of gently informed on a neutral subject. "I just thought—well. Yes."

Then, a spare cycle later, he looked up, optics shining with a new excuse.

"I found a new kind of flora last week."

With that simple statement, a bubble of realization burst inside the ninjabot: the scientist was blabbering. Prowl knew it now, and it gifted him with a welcome bit of stability. He gave a tolerating smile, pushing a friendly bit of air from his vents.

"Anicon, truly—"

"I realize you're busy! I apologize for interrupting you!" The other 'bot burst out, clean white plating nearly pink with the heat underneath it. He'd been caught, all of his unfocused small talk laid out, gutted and labeled a bumbling distraction. With Prowl looking on bemusedly, he seemed to steel himself for something, then muttered quickly: "I know you're busy, and I know this is… forward, but… I want to see you. I-if you have the time."

At first, it didn't make sense. He wanted to see Prowl. See him? There was no context, no sense. Prowl looked down at Moot's unhelpful (if faintly curious) control panels, thin mouth twisting, then it clicked in the _wider_ sense.

Shocked as he was, the first thing Prowl did was look over his shoulder towards the open shop door.

It was only then that he realized Anicon had a… the earth term 'crush', he found, was quite appropriate. Everything about it was much like a physical impact, sudden and arresting. Whatever the term, it was vastly more intricate and emotion-soaked than a clean mutual respect: the young mech's Spark had been stolen by his eloquent, noble rescuer with the hidden optics and the rich black plating, and, being wealthy, had the time and the resources to chase him down and appropriate a frequency or two. Prowl absorbed this development with undue surprise--perhaps his concepts of ready affection were so twisted from living with fickle Lockdown that he failed to miss the basic signs. But their spheres had long since parted and the request was out of thin air… the ninjabot still couldn't understand it.

"How so?" he asked blankly, a small snag of consternation appearing in the middle of his visor.

"I'm… I'm on an excursion in the Signa galaxy, on a secondary planet called Maka. It's an exquisite place, Prowl. You would enjoy it very much," Anicon promised him earnestly. It was the only bit of warm conviction he could muster up before he began fumbling shyly again, slender servo toying with his neck. "I… my systems told me you were in the area. This world is beautiful, with an abundance of plant life, and I… I just thought we might be able to see each other. On Maka. Have a… fun evening before we're too far apart for it."

Prowl stared at the screen as Anicon looked to the side, quietly overcome with whatever quivering sentiment that had prompted the call in the first place.

"After all, I don't know when I'm going to see you again."

A world of admission lay tucked in that one little sentence: a world of expectations. Once again, the ninjabot felt blindsided: Prowl had _never_ expected to see the younger mech again (as much as he would have enjoyed it in his genial way), and to have this built up, crystallized anticipation from his almost-disregarded friend nearly floored him. Still, he stopped, one servo at his chin.

He thought about it. All of it. Then, slowly, calmly, his thin mouth twitched into a smile.

"Where… would we meet?"

Anicon's pert features lit up with a bursting hope so physical it made the screen flicker.

Judging from the following explanation (conducted in thrilled half-sentences and exclamations), his companion had already reserved the proper facilities for their 'evening'. There were advantages to being exorbitantly wealthy, and one of them, apparently, was an invincible sense of optimism that flirted with presumptuousness. Prowl was quietly shocked by Anicon's level of attentiveness to the whole thing and was unable to accept it without a deeply flustered feeling: he wasn't used to _attention_, much less a gushing well of it. The fact that it came from a younger, more educated mech than himself put him in a slightly awkward position as well, but he merely nodded as Anicon went on, feeling an inquisitive detachment slide over him.

Was he truly doing this? Well… why wouldn't he?

Perhaps it wasn't normal… but it was certainly more socially standard than the lopsided, scarred mismatch of affection and irritation he received from his charming partner in their closed, oil-scented red world. As their partnership was strictly professional, as per his companion's well-worn oath, it surely contained no monogamy clause. Rant as he may, Lockdown could not actually move to condemn his activities…and the idea of shaking up their pattern of sexual presumptions somehow appealed to him in a sly way. To pursue and be pursued in a romantic sense—to be social with a kindred spirit and indulge in common pleasures—wasn't every mech and femme to experience it?

In hindsight, he took Anicon on for the novelty of it.

It was a cold statement but it was true, even if he had no expectations of the sexual sort. No, he had felt no spark between them that one long day—nothing but an easy camaraderie and mutual appreciation for culture; a pleasant surprise and a noncommittal fondness--but he agreed to their evening nonetheless. Closing the comm-screen with a few rote motions, Anicon's warm, overwhelmed farewell still coloring the thin air of the ship, Prowl folded himself back in his partner's huge chair and felt something breathless writhe in his Spark when his optics found the reflection of Lockdown's shop door in the dead commscreen.

Independence and 'professional relationships' aside, that sinking feeling that he had just done something very, very wrong would be the undoing of him.

* * *

He supposed, in the end, that it had all been incredibly obvious. Perhaps it was a cry for attention, or a test for Lockdown.

Maintaining his habit of under-explaining things, he convinced his partner to settle on the planet for his usual reason: botanical fascinations. It was… true, in a sense. Proximity was usually the dealmaker for Prowl's organic frolics but the ninjabot had also researched several possible (seedy) Makan entertainments for Lockdown as a lure, which he knew was a mistake as soon as he silently handed him the data-pad. The bounty hunter gave it straight back to him with a flat assurance that he'd find something to do, but that didn't stop the scrutinizing look or the snort. His mistakes only ballooned from there.

Above all, he didn't delete the frequency from the Moot's call log.

As soon as they landed, Prowl left. He began in the misty, orange-soaked morning of the long Makan solar-cycle, carried by an unfamiliar but satisfied anticipation as he wandered easily through the tall, sinewy forests closest to their landing site: he did not want to see too much, in case Anicon had a good deal to show him. Lingering on the prospect of lively conversation, he found he was truly looking forward to seeing his refreshing acquaintance again--so much so that meditation, even once enfolded in the naturally toasty, springy limbs of the pink-furred Makan trees, was pleasantly impossible.

After a day of airy leisure, the skies faded to a dusty indigo. Prowl, long since removed from the rural portion of the city-state, made his way toward the rustic city's center, absorbing the sophisticated but never pretentious column-besotted architecture and disregarding the overawed stares of the sun-browned locals. A street away from his destination, however, a discordant series of beeps invaded his syrupy, fanciful calm and seemed to kick his heelstruts out from under him. Lockdown was calling him.

Suppressing a hesitant twitch of his innards, Prowl waited a moment before answering.

_Beep._

"You still online?" His partner's deep rumble echoed in his internal auditory receptors as if projected across a long, static-striped hallway.

"Yes," the ninjabot answered stiffly, retreating to an awning with a pinched expression. "To what do I owe the honor of your transmission? Before you ask, I'm fairly convinced they don't sell high-grade here."

Lockdown snorted.

"Can't a 'bot check up on his partner?" The bounty hunter muttered lazily; Prowl could almost see him stretched over his workbench, optics dimmed. "You been out there for an age and a half. Thought you'd been trussed up by some natives and stripped for scrap."

"I'm perfectly fine, thank you," Prowl responded, his thanks more of a wry punctuation than anything. "The natives here aren't the trussing type."

"Whatever suits. Just make sure I don't hafta pick up any of your pieces. I like 'em where they are."

He was gingerly surprised, almost elated, that he had managed to be the classically dry, detached partner Lockdown so expected. He was almost free. He should have left it there, allowed Lockdown to cut the call and gone on with his under-explained evening, safe with the knowledge that whatever the bounty hunter didn't know wouldn't hurt him… but the sleepy, half-compliment spooked him. His smooth setup became dust in a matter of moments: suddenly pressing a servo to his auditory unit, straining to plan ahead in a spasm of alarm because the idea of Lockdown calling _again_ in the middle of the evening sent a hasty shiver of dismay up his struts, he ruined it.

"Lockdown?" He began a little too quickly, then paused a little too long. "I will be… out. For a while."

Each word dropped like a stone. Prowl looked down, sternly filtering the wince from his vocals before he spoke again.

"Don't wait up for me."

Lockdown's end of the line went deadly quiet for a moment.

"Never do."

The way he said it, dull and careful, made Prowl nervous as the call disconnected, but he didn't have time to agonize over it. True to his word, Anicon was standing by a stylish, gold-rimmed fountain in the center of the square, gazing keenly in the opposite direction and straining up every so often to his pede-tips. When Prowl approached him and brushed his arm, the little mech jumped, one servo pressed against his blue-striped chestplating, then instantly liquefied.

"Prowl," he managed. "It's wonderful… to see you again."

Prowl smiled, small and enigmatic. He put out an arm; Anicon, little body crumbling into a mess of delight, took it gingerly.

"Shall we?"

It was strange how his gallantry came so easily, presenting itself in a subtle pulse of ego. His companion clearly relished it, but was not slain: once on equal terms again, with Prowl's rich and handsome gestures dulled by a megacycle of intricate conversation, Anicon became so agitated speaking of his latest discoveries that he actually threw the ninjabot's arm off several times to pace around and gather leaves and fruit for demonstration props. Prowl watched, amused and pleased by the mech's honest passion, perhaps stooping to pick up a dropped twig or three. In the end, however, the scientist always returned to his side, a quivering bit of silence falling between them before Prowl took up the Autobot's arm again and Anicon relaxed into him.

They conversed, just as before, taking winding trails through the exotic gardens around one of Maka's most famous settlements. The night, made yet warmer by the smoldering violet sky, was dominated by several pastel constellations that Anicon pointed out to him, along with the fascinating rotational anomalies of the orange, cloud-stuffed moon. Next, the younger 'bot pushed him into a stately, vine-laced enclosure and bade him touch one of the red-plumed plants curling up from a collection of vases, petals pursed like waiting ladies' lips. Prowl stroked one: the plant gave a rapturous shudder and its feminine mouth split, revealing a sinewy, liquid-slathered, spine-speckled and altogether alarming proboscis that promptly snagged his servo and fought to suck it into its maw.

Anicon laughed himself silly from a safe distance, half shocked at his own impudence as his companion attempted to free himself from the hungry plant without hurting it. Prowl, once properly disengaged and slime-free, chuckled haltingly at his pitiful reaction time. It was an amusing enough exchange to begin with, but when the little scientist fluttered back to his side, apologizing and taking Prowl's wry rebuttals with a dripping sorrow, then pressing on and on until the older mech forgave him outright, Prowl realized they were… flirting. More than that, he realized he had never done it before.

_Damn him and his powertools. Disturbances. Irritated with him, lofty explanations hammered down to the dullest of clichés—_

"_Lockdown… can't you understand that I'm trying to become one with myself?"_

"_Whaddya know?"A servo scooping behind his back, one sliding up his chestplate; a hot mouth at his neck, scraping it with the lecherous mutter. "Looks like we're both tryin' to do the same thing."_

Well. Perhaps not in the traditional sense.

In his experience, flirting was much more akin to exchanging blows—seeing which fighter gave in first, though loss was not a lamentable thing. This… was a coy prod and tug of tangling words and glances. It was enjoyable, to say the least, and deliciously _subtle_. Their verbal rhythm kept them afloat as the city shut down around them, fewer and fewer Makans skittering from their path as the shop lights winked out. The two mechs, Anicon glowing sugary-clean in the low light alongside invisible, gold-licked Prowl, stopped at another fountain and reclined against the fantastically distorted statues that rimmed it.

After a span of comfortable, comment-speckled quiet, Prowl realized the other mech's optics were trained intently on his face. Staring. The ninjabot wiped uneasily at his smooth dermaplating, regarding Anicon pointedly from the top of his visor. Anicon squinted, confused, then jumped.

"Oh! No. No, there's nothing on your--" The scientist chuckled slightly, but still _squeezed_ inwards in embarrassment, antennae twanging. "I apologize for staring. This sounds cliché, but you are… so handsome, I can't help myself."

He looked up at Prowl with a new, small smile, something akin to reverence flowing across his soft features.

"Primus, you're beautiful."

Silent though he was, Prowl had to disagree.

He never considered himself often enough to settle on adjectives, but he… still preferred the term 'pretty'. It fit. Fit with a warm, masculine grip on his neck and the smell of Lockdown's preferred oil, but it fit. Anicon's praises seemed absurd and nearly greasy in their weightless nature. He shook his head, then, more out of disconcertion than modesty.

He had left Lockdown behind on the ship. Why was he still invading?

He managed to thank the flattering little mech and move onward, settling into yet another wonderful conversation that truly filled him. They sat at the fountain in the middle of that exquisite garden in the early hours of the passionately purple Makan morning and _talked_. All the delight that went into it drugged Prowl so completely that he didn't even jump when Anicon's servo brushed at his knee, then cupped it nervously. The Autobot flinched back when caught, laughing it away with a crushing shyness—he was truly acting outside of his comfort zone, but something fiery inside him fueled one impulsive motion after another--then did it again a few lines of thought later.

In a way, Anicon overwhelmed him.

Prowl was collected and far more mature, but he found himself helpless under Anicon's enthusiasm and his own uncertainty—and, lurking beneath it all, a pale curiosity. This was new to him. All of it. He was passive, simply coasting where the enjoyment led him; Anicon pursued him in his bumbling way, ardency supplanting skill, then took his servo and led him back into the city and up the proverbial stairs.

It was a beautiful room. More columns, fresh flowers. A part of him winced to see them severed and incarcerated in sterile glass instead of flourishing free in the wet ground, but a gaudy ribbon around the base let him know that it was purposeful. The scientist was… trying hard to please him. To capture some part of him, perhaps.

The door shut, the lights dimmed, and before he could think to say anything, the white-plated mech was standing in front of him, a world of anticipation in his blue optics.

"I—this isn't… We don't have much… time."

Slowly, Anicon went up to his pede-tips and kissed Prowl gently on the mouth, servos braced feather-light on his powerful forearms. He let the sound and the crisp sensation settle in the warm darkness. When that met with no resistance, his young face lit up again and he _fell_ into the ninjabot, wrapping his arms around the older mech and kissing—smooching!—him again with unbridled excitement, nearly pinching Prowl's soft dermaplating with the force of it.

His companion's enthusiasm should have put him at ease, and opened him to yet another pleasurable experience. Once alone and entangled with the other mech, however, Prowl was so conflicted he could hardly function. Thus incarnated, Anicon's boundless trust disturbed him deeply—no, once more perched at his cool distance, he was frightened for this naïve creature who could give his safety away so easily. Anicon had not even asked about his… allegiance, even when fully aware of the blank spot burned into his undercarriage.

He could be crawling into a berth with a Decepticon and would be none the wiser: Prowl's looks were rather feral in nature, underneath the elegant plating. No, he had no disarmingly blocky, friendly structure cast in bright colors, and his processor wasn't pure in the least. The cold knowledge of the outside world told him, in neutral terms, that he could drive his katana into the young mech, eviscerate him, crack his spark chamber and escape without the mildest of troubles. His horribly _open_ state nearly made Prowl nauseous.

Still, naïve Anicon drew him down onto the plush organic berth with a hushed ecstasy, and Prowl did not have the Spark—or the mental focus--to refuse him.

He had never been given time to discover his own natural way to intimacy. His first and only experiences had been crushed under Lockdown, and now the tense, subtle rhythm of the forthcoming act felt both alien and farcical. The young mech kissed him. Frequently, slowly, with small sounds of relish. The motion was so wetly personal that Prowl felt, at first, as though it were an invasion of some kind, and thwarted it with a stiff turn of his head. Anicon hooked a slim leg around his waist and nuzzled his neck, adjusting to the shift by kissing his cheek and gold-glazed shoulders, besotted servos roaming over the ninjabot's sleek frame.

Reciprocation was a piecemeal, preoccupied effort on his body's part. His systems lagged horribly, slow to warm and slower to sensitize. A tiny part of him would spark at a certain motion—a certain exchange of tenderness—then the rest would freeze as it progressed, painfully unsure. Perhaps Anicon had expected him to be gallant and sexually sweeping but the ritual consisted of little more than him coaxing Prowl into various embraces, though the child himself was too wrapped up in the myth of him to notice.

Then, with a jerking feeling, his thruster-wing punctured the doughy thing Makans called a berth. Pulling himself free was a rude, uncomfortable interruption, but Anicon still managed a breathy, amused sound and a promise to pay for it before his mild mouth was once again closed over Prowl's, pressing reverently.

Prowl lay still, contributing every so often with rote caresses, allowing himself to be _experienced_ by Anicon: young Anicon with his foolish trust and his eager, coy touches. Aside from the obvious structural weaknesses, the berth's halting buoyancy bothered him, unsuited as it was to dense metal lifeforms. Finally, after cycles of rolling around, nudging discomfort dribbled into apathy; Prowl never realized there was such a… distance inside of him. His Spark hummed mechanically, no brighter nor warmer than usual, even with a vulnerable, aroused mech—that he truly found physically attractive--twined so tightly around him.

There was a gap somewhere inside him: for whatever reason, this was failing to fill it.

Feeling like an observer, Prowl scraped his servo over the younger mech's phosphorescent chamber and failed to twitch at the resulting gasp or the burgeoning heat. The passionate sound skimmed over his black plating but did not penetrate, much like the act itself. Anicon was scalding and wound so tightly that every touch deserved a moan-punctuated twitch, but when he timidly reached upward to put a servo on Prowl's own chassis—quiet and lukewarm—Prowl caught his carpal-joint more quickly than he had intended.

Anicon made a gently dismayed sound. Kneeling, Prowl hung above the other mech, visor dimmed. Finally, he folded Anicon's slender wrist back onto his own white chestplating.

"I apologize," he whispered. "I cannot."

"Prowl, don't think… you're not forcing me," Anicon murmured breathlessly, vocals nearly shorting with the sweet weight of his arousal. He reached up into the dark and brushed Prowl's face with his warm digits. "I—this is wonder—"

"No. I do not… know you," Prowl said heavily, awaiting the child's cascade of disappointment. He did not think his rational (if besotted) companion would become angry with him for this lame surrender, but he still braced himself for a small scene. Instead, after descending through a moment of perplexed, sad silence, Anicon's optics lit, an almost thrilled starburst of understanding filling his face.

"Oh. Oh. I… I understand—I'm sorry, I shouldn't have…" He drew away from Prowl with a few squirms, looking down at the obnoxious, doughy berth in embarrassment, one arm clasped across his cooling front. "I'm sorry."

As he had his optics fixed on the pale sheets. Prowl was free to stare at him in fresh, faintly aggravated confusion. After a moment, Anicon shook his head, muttering into his soft white shoulderplating:

"This must seem crude to you. I'm sorry I tempted you. T-tried to."

Then, as a swelling gesture of his blushing goodwill and immediate regression, Anicon wrapped his arms around the ninjabot and held him as tightly as he could. The blazing lack of upset or offense, especially after such a solid refusal, left Prowl speechless in Anicon's embrace. Then he made the connection.

The child assumed his weakness to be some form of chivalry, or antiquated social code. He was thrilled to be involved in something so exotic, to the point where refusal for such a noble concept… was a blessing.

He obviously thought Prowl to be far more noble than he was.

Drifting apart with scraping plates and cooling pieces, they each sat up, the gracelessness of failed relations hanging like gaudy, silence-studded garlands around them. But Anicon did not move to leave: he looked at Prowl long and hard, bit his oral plating, then put his head on Prowl's shoulder, looping his arm around the older mech.

"You can know me better, if… you wish."

Prowl vented a small amount of air, but couldn't think of anything to say in the wake of the scientist's dusty, sweet tone. Anicon didn't take offense: instead, he took Prowl's servo in his own, squeezing firmly.

"I know this is forward, but we only have so much time… and I may as well make a complete evening of disregarding established social dances." Anicon smiled weakly, but looked directly into Prowl's dimmed visor. "Please come home with me, Prowl."

Prowl's optics widened. Like so many things Anicon had said before, it simply failed to connect.

"What?"

"You can… that is, I would be honored if I could request your services as my bodyguard," he whispered formally, timid smile still lingering. "Tinus wont refuse me. I mean, its not as though I visit dangerous places—well, or try to—but… it's common for my rank. Many Elite mechs and femmes have them."

It made sense, in an unthinkable way. In asking Prowl to return home with him, Anicon was offering him… a job.

Anicon was offering him a true, honest job.

"Your salary will be shameful, I can promise you, and I won't allow it to be any less," the scientist continued coyly. "And… we can see each other. But only if you want to. It c-can be, um, professional, but I—Prowl, I've never felt this way about anyone else. I want to know you. I want to—"

Anicon may or may not have spilled thought after heavy thought into the silent room: Prowl was lost in his lagging processor, functions icing over as he strained to _understand_.

To become the bodyguard of a well-mannered, cultured mech with a comfortably wealthy family… one who shared his passions, who, as he found, he could talk with for megacycles. To have nothing to do, nothing to fight—kill, eviscerate, murder--unless it was for the express cause of protection…. To have nothing but time to hone skills and thoughts and knowledge and live in nature. Nothing but _peace_.

Though he had not considered fulfilling it as a bodyguard, it was… what he had dreamt of since he had been activated. It sounded like paradise.

Or it should have. Involuntarily, Prowl's visor dimmed to a hollow blue-grey.

It… upset him, how the idea failed to please him. It fell like a bit of ore in an empty bucket, sounding around hopelessly for a long-disappeared niche. Echoing. Perhaps he felt too realistically filthy for such a dream; too functionally tainted. Somehow, his life with Lockdown was the only one he could imagine living, even given this pristine escape.

But Prowl had already proven his selfishness: his primal ability to toss away all connections and responsibilities in a bid for a more pleasant life. He had already run once, and from far more worthwhile strife. Why not again? Whether it had more to do with the lifestyle or the smirking mech it involved was unknown, but… there was something deeper in him—something dark and honest that smelled of fresh wax and felt like a thick servo on his back—that said he simply couldn't leave. Loyalty.

Yes, a decade and a half of relentless, silent loyalty. And… something stubborn and reverent and a little like love.

Heavy with the new knowledge of this personal loss—perhaps his sparkling dream had died stellar-cycles ago, but he was never forced to confront it—he turned to his almost-companion and vented a steadying stream of tepid air.

"Anicon."

The other mech was unaware of what had gone on inside of him during that long spell of silence, but knew enough of Prowl to see when he was troubled—and less than likely to agree. He reached for the ninjabot's other servo, suddenly overflowing with anxiety.

"Please. Please come with me; give it a chance. Even if it's… just for a while, you can use it to get away from that… person. I want to help you. Even if you don't like it, even if you leave, you can at least get away from him."

Wrapped as he was in his own quaint sorrow, it took Prowl a moment to realize whom Anicon was speaking of. Lockdown. He believed he was giving him the chance to get away from Lockdown. Saturated with a silent confusion, he searched the white mech's face; Anicon looked at him pleadingly.

"You can't be happy with him," he whispered with something very like pity. Seeing only Prowl's expression of consternation (and nothing to the contrary, not considering the vice of passivity), Anicon pressed onwards, growing cold and fearful just from speaking of the mismatched mech, the bloom of passion in his vocals betraying his cause: because he wanted to _save_ him, this dashing friend and lover--

"He isn't like you—like us," Anicon murmured fearfully. Something flinty and dissatisfied lodged itself in Prowl's chassis as he heard those loaded words, the feeling only deepening as Anicon went on. "He's a monster! Un-uncouth, I mean. I… don't know how you stand him, brilliant as you are. Rude—violent. Alone on that ship, he must make your life miserable—"

"He is my partner," Prowl snapped, lip plating nearly curled at the verbal filth of the ignorant assault, rebelling from his very core at the distortions. Instinctual. A moment later, he softened, seeing the young mech's stricken face. He shook his head, then—gently, politely—untangled his servos from the scientist's and slid off the fluffy berth with an echoing impact. "We… have a contract. I apologize, Anicon, but I must refuse your generous offer."

"Must? You c--he's keeping you against your will," Anicon concluded darkly, grasping along Prowl's dull words for a crack, vocals rising quickly. "Whatever he has of yours, Tinus can get it back for you, Prowl. We can levy charges against him—extortion, blackmail—get him in a holding cell where he belongs. You could be in _danger_--h-he's a Decepticon, you can see it--"

Now he was angry. Curling up his insides like an oil-flame as he whipped around, fist raised, the new, unfamiliar rage managed to escape him in one smoldering command:

"_Silence_, Anicon. Do not speak of what you do not know, or I will cease to listen."

It was more than enough to quiet the other mech. The fact that Anicon flinched away and jerked his legs onto the berth, optics wide with _fear_, sobered him to what he'd done: intimidated an innocent if… nauseatingly naïve soul. Lamentable. The stony rage vacated him as quickly as it had come, leaving an empty resignation. His insides were exhausted: brittle from all the temperature fluxes and striking disappointments. The ninjabot shook his head again.

"Though not the most legally-minded creature, Lockdown is no criminal," Prowl said firmly, visor angled toward the wooden floorboards. "I am with him because I wish to be. He has given me many things. I cannot speak ill of him."

He could not speak ill of the belligerent, roaring, morally indiscriminate, silently discerning, viciously intelligent mech he had come to share his life with—because that's what it was. His precious, perilous life: shared fifty-fifty as per Lockdown's word. They were… together, in business and apart from it, as two halves of a bizarre whole encompassed by a warming ship. They were impossibly comfortable with one another, with spotty, wry exchanges as a stimulating lifeblood. Prowl would never truly be alone, and Lockdown gave up his solitude and his simplicity to have Prowl by his side. It was… home, so long as they were both there.

It meant something. He didn't know what, but that didn't make it any less important. Half-smiling at the unpredictable, painful path that had brought him to the other mech, like a stasis-fright Lockdown had rescued him from, Prowl murmured slowly:

"He is good, in his own way."

"How? In… what way?" Anicon whispered haltingly, still half-curled on the berth.

Prowl looked at the quivering little scientist and realized him for all he was and all he was not, and his pretty words and shameless salaries and botanical expertise did not fill the gaps Prowl himself nursed. That fact—the simple fact of what did not fit—was a small victory for him. The ninjabot relaxed down to his girders, feeling _sense _return to flesh out the world around him; all the acidic resentment for the child vanished from his fuel lines and left him to think about Anicon's question. In what way… was Lockdown good?

Simple.

"My way. I would not abandon him for any sum," he answered softly. He touched his visor solemnly. "Forgive me for elevating my vocals earlier. You did not deserve it, but I will not give myself another chance to offend you."

He approached the berth, simply accepting Anicon's wide, blank stare as he placed a bracing servo on the child's arm.

"Thank you for your time, Anicon," he murmured, an odd mix of kindness and resigned frankness on his long face. "Although this will be the last time we meet, I will remember our conversations."

Stung, Anicon struggled to his knees as Prowl turned and crossed the decadent room, reaching unsteadily for his once-rescuer.

"The last—Prowl? Prowl, wait—"

The door shut.

* * *

It was early morning by the time Prowl climbed Moot's ramp.

Any sense of affirmation or completion he entertained upon exiting the villa had been worn down by each step towards Lockdown and a looming anxiety. He simply… did not feel good about it. Even if he wouldn't remember the undeleted frequency until later, or failed to mull over Lockdown's tendency to obsess and rage over _insults_, he couldn't suppress a slow, apprehensive aspiration as he entered the dark ship.

He hadn't thought to look at himself.

It was still dark when he left the city, and the forest offered no reflective surfaces, so it was no wonder he missed the lurid white scratches in his paint. Anicon had surely gained a few black scuffmarks of his own, but the other mech wasn't to be notified of their existence by his partner's wordless stare. It was as if he had been physically struck—crucified--the moment he entered Lockdown's dark, abnormally chaotic workshop: the bounty hunter turned in his chair, thick white face blazing hatefully, and _glared_ at his chestplate. Prowl flinched and looked down, digits immediately fanning over the incriminating scrapes, then looked up, visor stretched wide.

Even before he left, he had concocted an excuse for Lockdown. Now, nearly short-circuiting, he opened his mouth to give it--or perhaps truly tell him what had happened in a vomit of whispers--but Lockdown rose to his pedes like a night-soaked specter and stomped toward him, Prowl's olive data-pad clutched in his bulky fist.

Prowl stepped back compulsively, fumbling.

"I—I was—"

"None of my business," Lockdown cut him off, vocals crackling nastily. Thinned red optics smoldering, he shoved the pad into Prowl's chest, pinning it there with a belligerent sneer until the other mech groped for it. "Got those printouts from the next job. ETA is seven megacycles. Get to work, _partner_."

He shoved Prowl with the tips of his rigid digits and then turned to stalk off, vanishing into the bridge and leaving a raw-edged chasm behind him. More quickly than Prowl could stand, it filled with a dense, cold shame, and he dutifully—blankly—returned to his empty room, pad hanging loosely in his servo. The moment he could move from his slump against the shut door—he ached so heavily, processor and Spark—he pulled a jar of solvent from underneath his berth and set to removing the scrapes of white paint from his front and inner thighs, soaking and wiping them away with the mournful speed of a sleepwalker. Next, he waxed them over. After it was done, he looked at his perfectly polished plating and felt no change: somewhere, he was still scraped on the inside, and the pervading sting was both unfamiliar and tragic. He put his head against his knees and sat for the rest of the seven megacycles, silent, letting the fact of what he'd done filter through his insides.

Even though Prowl knew that clipped, doomed exchange was but the sordid beginning of a personal battle, it didn't make it any easier when Lockdown truly began his attack in (snarling, glaring, shoving) earnest.

Prowl abided the abuse, at first. Lockdown's coldness wasn't unfamiliar, and his few inner struggles were violent but lost steam quickly: why, the ninjabot fumed, was the unrefined bastard so furious with him when what he had done didn't violate the barest of their agreements? But of course, there were his unspoken laws: the amoral vigilante delivered justice as he saw fit! When he wasn't insulting or physically provoking him, Lockdown—the mech who lived by the practical, objective rules, or so he said—crushed and constricted any nervous apologetic effort, curtailing Prowl's every platonic gesture with hard coolness or absolute ire. Lockdown was infuriated at his non-betrayal, and the injustice and irrationality of it inflamed the ninjabot to no end.

Then Prowl's jumpy rage simply stilled as he was forced to face his misery: a misery so throbbing and concentrated that it could only stem from being severed from one's only sentient bond in life. Whether or not he was technically in the clear, it didn't matter. Lockdown felt how he felt, and in those terms, Prowl had wronged him, or insulted him at the least. If Lockdown wouldn't hear or accept the terms of their strange relationship in the first place, he certainly wouldn't hear a plea to restore them, which left Prowl no hope of a civilized approach. He was… an impossible bastard.

Fortunately, Prowl had learned more from the bounty hunter than haggling techniques and, faced with so high a price, he wasn't afraid to overstep boundaries.

* * *

"Damn it, kid! Can't you do anything—"

Lockdown had traded in pointedly aggressive exchanges since Makan. Bullying him: because, of course, Prowl needed to know how much he simply didn't care about him. Personally impersonal. The hunts themselves had been painful, with both two bounty hunters operating in limited senses while at odds with each other—it was difficult to tell who was suffering more--but they managed in their tight-lipped way.

The explosion, however, was not intentional, even if it mirrored Prowl's growing lack of patience with the entire ordeal. He had blown open an underground prison hatch by mixing up two buttons on a new device, which would have been fine had it been in the proper time-frame: as it was, the rather deafening fumble had drawn the attention of the well-armed guard, who flooded in, further delaying the retrieval of the incarcerated vigilante that the Orthon Cruxes wanted back so badly.

Obviously, the situation was not ideal. Prowl was stiff with anger and quicker to strike, further off balanced by his explosive faux pas and Lockdown's ever-roused fury. When a red-clad guard charged him from the front, he responded in kind, skewering the creature with his momentum and flinging him to the floor—and failing, so uncharacteristically, to watch his back or the scout poised behind it with a bludgeoning tool. He turned too late to prevent a full-scale blow, only alerted to the danger by a wet grunt of exertion, but was knocked back instead by a green and black blurr that snapped the unfrail creature in half and dashed him against the wall in a single crushing gesture.

The hammer was still an issue. Knocked loose from the dead guard's grip, it could have smashed down so hard it ripped his wings and thrusters off, but as it was it merely _fell_ on him: Prowl grunted in pain, stumbling foggily against the wall and right into Lockdown's wide black chestplating. The older mech caught him by the neck, brusquely wrenching his aching partner to rights with a slow, close sneer.

"Looks like that weakling rubbed off on more than just your paintjob." The bounty hunter's red optics glinted evilly. "You're a regular protoform today."

They were forced apart the clang of a projectile weapon, but Prowl rolled along the wall, recovering his footing just in time to fully experience the sincere anger lighting his innards. He seized a guard when it charged close enough, keeping one side of his visual field burning on Lockdown as he slammed the creature's crunchy head into his filed knee-guard.

"Does your side of this imaginary contract include a subsection on obligatory humiliation?" Prowl grit out, tossing the body aside and punching two foolish bystanders in the gut.

"Nope. Doesn't stop me from pointing out the obvious, though," Lockdown shot back, slamming his way through whatever needed slamming.

"Only natural, considering your mental capacity."

Lockdown heard the icy retort and stiffened, punching out an opponent then jerking over his shoulder to glare at the idiot.

"Don't push me, kid," he growled darkly, formerly flinty bullying condensing into a threat.

"You push and expect not to be pushed in return? Your double-standards are _fascinating_, partner—" Prowl called out with proper ire, slicing his heel-struts across a guard's midsection then using the resulting momentum to imbed his sharp pedes into the groin of another. Something clicked within him, either with the blow or the exchange, and his tone warped into a sweeping arrogance. Internally gaining a hateful rhythm and purpose, Prowl fought on, raising his vocals over the crashes and clangs of battle. "I'm surprised my rationality drive is still intact after so long with you. In truth, I found some difficulty in carrying on with Anicon: I'd nearly forgotten what it was like to experience maturity in another, much less converse at length!"

"Why can't you just slaggin' say _talk_?!" Lockdown roared, punctuating the explosive demand with the thick crunch of bones. The bounty hunter seethed, baring his teeth and flinging the set of guards to the ground. "I swear, I'm gonna throttle you if I hear one more pretentious—"

"Three syllables: I'm proud of you," Prowl snapped coolly, visor flashing as he sent one of his shuriken spinning into the dark, thin air. "Next, you might learn how to enunciate."

"_You little sl_—"

Physically, Prowl was outmatched.

Not only would he lose in such a confrontation, he had no wish to fight Lockdown's choice battle… nor to degrade their situation to such a primitive level. If the other mech refused to communicate with him then it would come to a confrontation, and the only thing he truly had over Lockdown—and he had to remember that technically it was an advantage—was his intelligence. Rather, his supposed pretentious intellect. Prowl wasn't naturally pretentious, but he could certainly pretend to be if it would enable him draw Lockdown out of his barricaded mental fort. Prowl would deny him his much-wanted physical fistfight… while angering him with the thing he hated most. It didn't sound like a particularly intelligent plan—the older mech was painfully passionate, physical and easily blinded by fury—but as long as Prowl halted it within the proper timeframe, he would come out of it alive.

The bad plan, apparently, was off to a good start.

The only thing that prevented Lockdown from storming over and striking him was a fresh wave of guards, this time rearmed with hand-held canons. Both partners were forced to activate their every circuit to stay online for the next few cycles, dodging and rolling under the putrid green-yellow beams, but still the bounty hunter vocalized, yelling and howling raggedly with the swell of rage Prowl had triggered in his heaving chassis. Finally, when all of the weapons of concern (or their holders) had been deactivated and the cavernous chamber stood empty of any breathing, red-suited life, Lockdown turned and jabbed his hook at his partner, nearly shaking with the effort.

"Y'know what?" He began roughly, his breathlessness lending him an irrational, nearly feral appearance as he glared at the younger mech. "You've fragged this run up enough. Get your aft back to the ship, Prowl. I can finish this myself."

While insults had come aplenty, Lockdown had never stooped to talking down to him; sending him back to the ship like a disobedient youngling. Prowl bristled at the humiliation, letting himself become as angry as he needed to.

"As your contracted equal, I refuse," Prowl stated, flipping up his katana and booting it up afresh with a smatter of aqua sparks. Assuming a liquid battle posture with the activation snap of his blue-studded face-guard, he regarded Lockdown out of the corner of his visor. "Half of this money is mine."

Eventually, Lockdown would realize his 'contract' for the double-edged blade it was.

Prowl had touched a nerve-circuit. The bounty hunter's optics lit and he started forward with a clenched servo, saturated with red rage and, much like Prowl before him, unaware of the danger at his back. The creature appeared quickly, sliding out of one of the upper vents and dropping down behind the bounty hunter. It was obviously one of the prison's elite guard—the ornate metal mask and the blue uniform proved it—and its gazelle-like range of motion was truly incredible, demonstrated by a deft tumble and a leap and a fluid leveling of a sword towards Lockdown's cuttable flanks. Coolant flooding his knotted substructure, Prowl didn't have time to do anything but charge forward, even as Lockdown reached out to grab him and snarled:

"_Damn it, kid, get back to that_—"

Prowl swooped in under Lockdown's outstretched servos, snagging his partner around the waist and using the extra push to force the bounty hunter aside and bury his hissing katana sideways into the insidious attacker, who convulsed as it found his cartilage-packed nerve-trunk, dying instantly. Lockdown felt the serrated, wet impact through Prowl's grip on him, and twisted over his shoulder with a short grunt of surprise. Prowl waited until the bounty hunter had _seen_ the dead guard before retracting his weapon straight into his shieldmod with a razor-sharp spray of liquid, then suddenly shoving impossibly heavy Lockdown into the nearby wall and following him down to the floor.

They hit with an echoing slam, combined weight shaking the floor. Understandably, what with the wet organic substance trickling down his backplating (which was crunched against a wall), Lockdown wasn't quite sure what had just happened. That didn't stop him from instantly resenting Prowl for it, especially as he was half in his lap, blank face-guard still dominating his long face. Patience dangerously low, graciousness nowhere in sight, Lockdown muttered:

"Off."

When Prowl didn't respond, body and shield mods and emotionless visor humming maddeningly in the silence of the prison, the bounty hunter snorted and moved to get up, but Prowl _exerted_ on him. The ninjabot pinned him expertly back against the wall with a painful clang and, visor thinned to nothing, glared into his face.

"_Damnit_, you—"

"I met with Anicon."

Prowl had to say it; he had to set the score.

The words did not seem to make sense in the fluid-scented chamber of the prison. The crushing obviousness of it caught Lockdown off guard: while the change in subject earned the ninjabot a few kliks of uneasy silence, in the end Lockdown simply grimaced and tried to physically shrug Prowl off. The effort was thwarted by a few simple shifts in weight. His partner pressed on, somewhat breathless behind his anonymous mask, simply staring at Lockdown—imbuing the visual link with something hard-edged and incendiary—in order to make him realize it was a _confrontation_.

"Last week, when we stopped at Maka. We met; visited the gardens. They're well-worth the effort."

Lockdown shook his head, disgusted, but still took a moment to dredge up an answer.

"Good for you. Slaggin' organiphiles."

"He offered me a position."

The shock on Lockdown's face never would have _existed_ to anyone who knew him less than Prowl, but it only lasted a nanoklik and then dribbled into a revolted certainty. Like overturning a rock to see the fetid, squirming undergrowth, it was as if he had known the little brat wanted his partner for keeps, and the knowledge of it all tasted foul. Still, he looked at Prowl with a hateful, predatory humor.

"Really now. When d'you pick up your uniform? Hear those scrub-bots' digs are getting pretty fancy," Lockdown growled, something cruel and knowing lighting in his optic. Insides knotting, Prowl slammed a servo to one of Lockdown's chassis pressure-points and ground into it, nearly making the older mech snarl.

"He requested my services as a body-guard," Prowl snarled from behind his face-guard, inches from Lockdown's face, visor a mere sliver of hot blue. "The body guard of a kindred Spark, well-educated and eloquent as he is peaceful. Interested in botany and fine techno-martial arts. It sounds… appealing, doesn't it?"

"Sounds like Pit."

"You have no taste."

"You wouldn't last a week," Lockdown snorted scathingly, reaching for Prowl's hold on him and wrenching the ninjabot's servo away from himself, messy grip tightening a fraction with the appearance of a brutal grin. "Keepin' in his shadow, servin' him oil and pretty words—I know how you run. You'd malfunction. You need action; you need somethin' to get your engines goin' or you'll snap like a piece of solder."

Lockdown leered down at him, radiating all the cruel glee of crushing a dearly-held dream. Reveling.

"You think you come away from this life clean? It's _in_ you, kid. It'll follow you."

Perhaps he expected shock, or quaking silence: a part of Prowl's shadowy inner nature had been ripped out and laid across his life, exposing a compulsory violence; a nasty revelation that the hunter was only too glad to hit him with. But if there was a strike, there was no impact. Prowl only shook his head: he had no dream to shatter. Lockdown had simply put into words what he had realized the moment Anicon made the offer.

"I realize that," the ninjabot murmured, retracting his facemask in the heavy silence and looking directly into his partner's thinned optics so he could _see him say the words_. "That's why I refused him."

Lockdown's taut shock swarmed his circuits, then blinked into thin air.

"In what way?" The bounty hunter managed briskly.

"In _every _way," Prowl said firmly, glaring at his partner and his untouchable audacity. "What I do in my own company is _none of your business_. Moreso, just as I would respect your privacy, my personal mistakes are not up for scrutiny."

Lockdown waited, or stalled, gaze cutting into something beyond Prowl, insides churning slowly. Perhaps he was conflicted, contrasting Prowl's scuffmarks to the call log to his words (personal mistakes--), but his silence still gave Prowl the time to free his numb servo from Lockdown's suddenly atrophied grip, and place it on his partner's spike-split shoulder plating.

"I returned to you, Lockdown, because part of me feels I belong here. I enjoy my life with you, and how much you have done for me—given me," Prowl began softly, the newly-discovered reverence resonating in his vocals, but sucked dry the next moment by a unbending frankness. "But the fact remains that I can live elsewhere. I returned to you this time, not crawling but walking… but if you persist in this childish behavior and these double standards, I may not do so again."

Prowl let his servo fall free from Lockdown's shoulder and rose to his pedes, looking down at his silent, still, hard-plated partner. Then, quietly, Prowl asked him to swallow his pride.

"I do not want to leave you, Lockdown. I'm willing to forgive you, should you come to realize I have nothing to be forgiven for," he finished gravely. "These are my conditions."

Slow and simple, Prowl reached out his servo.

The prison echoed around them, huge and disconnected. How they had escaped another swarm of guards was beyond rationality, but all Lockdown was honestly concerned with at the moment was the grey-plated, neutral servo hanging in front of his face. He didn't want to take it. He was slow to consider it, slower still to reason why he should. For uncomfortable reasons that had to do with scuffmarks and one Pit of a long, resentment-stiffened night, he didn't want to give up quite yet: didn't want to be spooked into shaking on something that he still didn't… understand.

Prowl was his equal; Prowl was his partner. He deserved respect, but forgiveness was something else entirely. The implications were off the charts and Lockdown stalled on them, wrenched askew by the ninjabot's soft words, but never lost sight of Prowl waiting with his offer outstretched.

In the end, he didn't have a choice. Knowing that to get up and walk off without that one damn gesture would be the end of things, Lockdown, jaw set, finally reached up and gripped Prowl's servo—and grunted when the little ninjabot yanked him to his pedes in one great creaking heave. Suddenly vertical, he nearly stumbled, then drew away from the other mech, eyeing him in dull confusion. The klik he found Prowl's blank visor and half-upturned mouth, however, he knew it for what it was: a gesture of goodwill and a silent message.

In making sure he was on his feet before shaking on anything, Prowl clearly ordered his priorities: Lockdown himself came before business.

It was an impulsive motion, then, that when Prowl attempted to drop Lockdown's servo and move away, the bounty hunter trapped it, gripping it in his own and simply keeping it there, warm and tight. Prowl said nothing, neither moving to pull away nor instigate anything, but watching his partner with an uncritical respect. Finally, Lockdown looked Prowl full in the face and shook his servo three times, hard and short. The expression was standard, masculine and staggeringly shallow, but it was all Lockdown could manage at the moment, and Prowl understood that.

When their servos fell to their sides, both felt as though something had come unblocked. A world of real growth—based on _want_ rather than need--had been unlocked with a simple gesture. After a moment of quiet shuffling, Lockdown snorted in something like creeping disgust, but still was slow to speak.

"…Should've stated your conditions at the beginning of this mess like normal contracts. Would've saved me a lot of trouble."

At the return of the wry, pleasantly tactless Lockdown—his partner, not his antagonist—Prowl relaxed invisibly.

"But this isn't a traditional business partnership, now is it?" He asked wryly, visor gleaming as he smirked slightly.

It was the right thing to say. Lockdown laughed aloud, the full and toasty sound ringing in the cavernous chamber.

"Farthest thing from it, kid," he rumbled finally. His laugh—and Prowl's yet un-translated words--still resonating in him, resettling his insides, Lockdown relaxed and tightened his hook, shaking out a hitch in his neck with an almost-ready grin and a careful glance to his black-plated partner. He jerked his head, smirk widening as the far-off sound of alarms bloomed red and nasal to their left. "Now, uh… how 'bout you'n me go get that bounty?"

Prowl nodded, face-guard snapping shut just slowly enough to let Lockdown catch his smile.

* * *

Acceptance came that day. Lockdown would understand what he had agreed to—or rather, what he had agreed to acknowledge—sometime in the slow, starry future, but something more important still lingered after they gathered the prisoner, turned him in and continued with their intertwined (and financially bolstered) lives. Thankfully, Prowl didn't wait long to recieve it. Forgiveness consisted of a soft description of an organic-based garden planet after an invitation—a raised arm—to come stand beside Lockdown and then—gingerly—a thick servo curled around his waist. Careful, masculine and silent, Lockdown dropped his weapons and let him back into his life, and Prowl felt something inside himself settle beautifully to rights again as the green planet twirled on the display and Lockdown grumbled something about being able to fit it in between their next jobs—but only if Prowl wanted it. Only if Prowl wanted it.

It wasn't a simple return to status quo. Prowl had _come back_ from a pristine escape, and now Lockdown had to work to keep him. As alien a concept as it was, as much as he rebelled at the idea of _working to please_ someone, the bounty hunter felt instinctively that there was no other option: he had to keep his partner like he had to land the next hunt. He started out just _wanting_ the kid in his own lecherous, richly flippant way, but now it was something more solid, like an extension of his religion of functionality. The little ninjabot had forced him to do many unpleasant things in the course of their time together, but Lockdown couldn't squirm out of the mechanics of it even if he could duck most implications--and even that was getting exhausting. The revelation that Prowl was with the ill-tempered, sociopath bounty-hunter by his own sentient choice, not through a staggering lack of options, was something neither could fully understand yet, but with it their simple partnership was to become, in small quiet fits of cycles and stellar-cycles and odd, creeping moments, something vastly more involved, intimate and laborious.

In sum, better.


	12. Useful

A/N: I love random scenes! I'm so glad everyone is enjoying what is fast becoming my TFA OTP of awesome sexy win D: (HEY. I don't care that Lockdown only freaking showed up in two episodes! I'm a FANGIRL, I live and deal in delusions! … My god, if Mr. Bounty Hunter doesn't come back, I will never forgive TFA.)

And… please, _please_ review, if you have the time! My only inspirations for this are the darling Eno and your thoughts: what you like, what you don't, what you'd like to see. So if you want these on a weekly-ish basis, spare a word or two! I love them so! :blowskisses:

…And otherwise I kinda die of writers block and my prose suffers horribly D: Take your guilt and enjoy! XD

* * *

Useful

* * *

Lockdown's body was a veritable fortress.

Weight, speed and dexterity he had aplenty, in addition to a knack for spike-laden physical intimidation that bordered on hellish. While perfect for throwing his weight around in (anti-)social or professional situations, his personal health was another issue entirely. He had so much of everything that, every so often, something diminutive and sharp went awry in his undulating foreign-tech innards, and his bulk suddenly became an obnoxious inconvenience: his armored exostructure was too thick to get at it. It wasn't enough to go crying to a medibot over, obviously (Lockdown wouldn't do that for anything short of full-scale evisceration in an acid-bath… or nasty heat-based nanoviruses), so he sucked it up until it settled back into place… or until the rest of his system sucked it up and learned to deal, long-term health repercussions be damned.

'Sucking it up' changed definition, however, when he actually had someone to complain to, and that someone had infinitely more common sense than himself—plus some sneaky techno-voodoo tricks stowed up his piping.

* * *

"Ugh."

The miserable, nearly rhythmic aspirations were the only sound on the bridge, aside from Moot's peaceful beeping. Lockdown's scuffed metal plates clanked together disconsolately as he shifted in his chair, rolling his hulking shoulders.

"Dam--ngh."

Prowl looked up from his solvent with surprisingly little patience. Lockdown had been moaning and sucking in air all day since a particularly… filthy run. The turncoat prince of a shipping empire had done well to retreat to such a disgusting planet with his untold millions of appropriated booty, as only two bounty hunters were dedicated enough—and stupid enough--to brave the sulphur-laden, mech-hungry gas-swamps to get at him. While they weren't facing competition from the outside hunting sphere and the bounty was deliciously high, the job was still less than a pleasure trip and Lockdown had yanked something out of place during one of their more enthusiastic retreats from the vicious sentient mud. Now, back on Moot with the credits properly siphoned into their accounts (and goo plastered to every inch of them), the bounty hunter's misplaced part was making itself known.

"Ughn."

Whether he intended to draw Prowl's attention with the deep, ongoing noises of discomfort or not, it was beyond distracting. Prowl, as it was well known, detested distractions, even when setting about a task as rudimentary as dissolving the putrid caking of sulphur mud on his long legs and smearing it away. When he had finished inspecting his gleaming black plating for any clinging life-forms or leftover goo, and Lockdown had whined and cursed roughly thirty-seven more times, Prowl set the solvent aside and moved to the bounty hunter's side.

"What is paining you?"

Lockdown looked almost perturbed that he'd asked: he definitely hadn't realized his vocalizations. He wasn't used to having an audience, and suffering in silence was compulsory when there was no one around to listen. He shook his head, turning back to the main screen where he was browsing some barely-personal files.

"Nothin'," he grumbled, dabbing disinterestedly at buttons and keys. "Just some of my plumbing gone weird."

Prowl might have left him alone if Lockdown hadn't grunted tensely again immediately after downplaying his injury. As it was, the ninjabot gripped the back of his chair and heaved his streamline weight against it; it spun with a creak and a surprised sound from his partner, who immediately grimaced at him when Prowl stopped the chair and wordlessly set upon him with his servos, pressing and touching. Lockdown half-squirmed upwards, glaring at his partner.

"What're you—"

"If I have to listen to you complain about it, I have the right to do something about it."

Feathers ruffled, Lockdown looked about ready to jump into a defensive snit-fit, all about how not only was he _not_ complaining, he didn't need Prowl's help—but when the ninjabot's sensitive, clever servos briefly explored the air above his chassis, then floated to a point just in front of his flank and just above his hip and touched it cautiously, Lockdown shut up.

"Here?" Prowl asked, grazing his digits over the spot, practically looping around the area where the intense, toothy buzzing originated. Lockdown's entire side was stiff with the hot, serrated feeling of something knocked rudely out of place inside him, which always smarted like the devil, but strange Prowl had found _the actual part_.

"Yeah. There," Lockdown admitted, half-wincing as the silent mech prodded it. "How'd you—"

"Circuit-su. I can sense disruptions," Prowl murmured with a warm, gleeful hint of pride. After a bit more contemplative, small-scale inspection, the ninjabot regarded (the ever-skeptical) Lockdown from the top of his visor, smiling slightly. "Would you allow me to… fix it?"

"Yeah, right. Like I'm gonna let you use any more of your damn pressure-points," the bounty hunter snorted, forcibly yanking his chair back to the forward position (another half-grunt of pain) and staring back up at his files. "Wipe it."

Prowl slipped to the arm of his chair, pressing him with his smooth, rational vocals.

"You misunderstand. It's a kind of vibration-therapy: nothing invasive. I promise, even if I fail to cure your malfunction,"--which didn't seem likely, considering Prowl's confident little smile lurking at his spiked shoulder—"your pain will be much improved."

Lockdown had to stall at that. Non-invasive. Vibration. Pain-relief. Wary and overcritical as he was of techno-voodoo, that sounded pretty damn good.

"Alright," he growled finally, closing down his open file screens with an impatient motion. He looked over at Prowl, already half-resenting the little ninjabot for making him agree to this circus. "What do I do?"

"First, cleanse yourself," Prowl instructed him loftily, moving behind him to gather something. "Once you are done, I will be waiting in your room."

Turning in his chair, Lockdown rolled his optics and opened his mouth, because this was _too much._ He shifted gears, drawing air to rail against the mamby-pamby techno-voodoo of Prowl's 'cleansing' ritual and how there was no way in _Pit_ he was going to go along with any sort of fast or meditation or stick-shaking dance—then realized his partner was holding out a jar of solvent and a dripping cloth, and that he was still slathered in… smelly, chunky stuff from the waist down. Regardless of his metaphysical roots, the 'bot could be staggeringly literal sometimes.

Stalking over and snatching the materials from his superior and smiling ninjabot, Lockdown clanked down to the floor and set to work 'cleansing' himself with many a grumble and a wince from his aching side, hoping to Primus that Prowl's 'therapy' would mimic the effects of a hardcore overcharge as much as possible: that was what he really, really needed, after a day like this.

* * *

By the time he dragged himself into his room—finding Prowl delicately folded up and meditating on his enormous berth in 'preparation', of course—he was fully exhausted (a megacycle more of drying time made the once-sentient mud into something like plaster: he'd had to add acid to it to get the stuff off, and even then it still _squealed in pain_), irritated, and ready to put some sort of stop to the nagging tenderness of his side and the uneasy choking sensation of a malfunctioning part. When he entered and glared expectantly at the serene-looking ninjabot, lit only by the pretty light of his relaxed visor, Prowl broke his trance and slipped off his partner's berth. The younger mech looked him over, inspecting Lockdown's cleaning job from afar, then motioned him towards his berth.

"I realize only your abdomen hurts but I must align your entire system, or else the unaligned parts will force the corrected one back to the improper place—or even crash down and overwhelm the cleared space, sending it into shock and making it worse than before," Prowl explained softly, moving aside as Lockdown stomped over. "You can't expect to clear one space and not have it submit to the negative energies around it."

"Fine. So long's you don't offline me or wipe my core in the process," Lockdown grumbled. "Anything's an upgrade over this."

As Lockdown lowered himself down to his truck-bed berth, wincing sharply, Prowl drew closer, fluidly assessing something to do with Lockdown's size and position and reaching a conclusion in the same moment. The instant Lockdown was settled flat on his backstruts, supine with his arms to his sides, Prowl silently vaulted the berth and landed on his knees over the bounty hunter's hips, then settled down with a polite clank. The ninjabot—knowing he deserved no interruptions for this good deed—readily set to work on Lockdown's mess of an over-modded body, sensing out snags and trying to sensitize himself, running his servos over the other mech's chassis for more ailing vibrations.

Never silent long, Lockdown started to chuckle. No, he kept chuckling: the deep, rich sound went on and on, dwindling then surging up again under his warm plating, screwing with Prowl's sense of attunement. Finally, Prowl snapped:

"And what do you find so funny?"

"Primus, you ninjabots must be a 'face-deprived bunch," Lockdown chortled thickly, regarding his tense little partner from one amused red optic. "So, what--did you pick up this position from your rickety, horny old master-bots, or is it more of a student bonding activity?"

Suddenly all too aware of their flush pelvis-plating, barely-brushing chassis fronts and the clench of his cream-colored thighs, Prowl bristled.

"This--this isn't standard! In professional circumstances, you would be on a chair and I would attend you from the side," Prowl protested hotly, stiffening under that odd, squirming burn of embarrassment: the position really was quite sexual, though unintended. Prowl frowned down into Lockdown's dark, green-split abdominal plating so he wouldn't have to see the other mech's stupid grin, finishing sullenly: "You happen to be too ridiculously large for that to be an option. I cannot…reach all of your energy points from the side."

"Right. Ri-iiight."

Lockdown aspirated, short and husky, nearly settling down, then said cheekily:

"If you wanted to mount me, all ya had to do was ask."

"This is a very delicate procedure, Lockdown. I cannot promise I won't knock out a vital circuit or _seven_ if you persist with these interruptions," Prowl snapped, more out of blushing nerves than malice.

Even though he and Lockdown had been together for a little over two decades and Prowl had learned to disregard most of the odd comments, Lockdown was still fully capable of yanking his chain when he truly wanted to. Mostly, the jabs were about Prowl's sex drive, but even then, his reactions were only natural. The ninjabot would have considered it a personal loss to become so desensitized that he wasn't even riled up by uncouth verbal advances: that would have meant that Lockdown had managed to crush both his dignity and his sense of decorum, which were quite important to him… if incredibly arduous to maintain in the bounty hunter's depraved sphere.

Slipping into a neutral state—the point of his preparatory meditation, which even Lockdown's overtures couldn't spoil--Prowl's visor dimmed as he spread one servo over Lockdown's abdomen and began to hum. It was an exploratory process, rather like tripping up and down a staircase of fleshy notes, as the ninjabot felt out the proper frequency: each and every Cybertronian had one, a natural cumulative resonance of the chug and hum of their inner parts (and something mystically deeper), but tapping it provided a key to healing. For Lockdown's slipped component, he sought a compromise between Lockdown's own unfocused tone and his clean one, which he would build from. Once Prowl felt out the correct one, he leaned forward and touched his forehead to Lockdown's, feeling it vibrate back at him through the others' thick white plating: a veritable swell of agreement. Lockdown abided the strangely bold invasion well, perturbed only by Prowl's seamless execution.

Starting with his processor-circuitry took the longest. The ninjabot's servos folded tensely around his cranium, Lockdown's tattoo-split facial plating screwed up as the kinks eased themselves out, any and all discordant energy pushed out of his electrical mechanisms, which rattled themselves back into proper places they probably hadn't occupied for a hundred years or more. When Prowl drew back and rebooted his visor, Lockdown shot him a resentful look.

"Ow."

"Healing often hurts," Prowl offered solemnly. Lockdown snorted.

"Did I ask you, fortune cookie?"

As scornful as the retort was, the stuffy, radiating pain in his head (or the chipper realigned circuits) seemed to trigger another thought. He put up a servo (he had two to spare that day) and rose up onto his elbow.

"Hold up. You sure this won't screw with my insides?"

Prowl frowned, scooting back slightly to accommodate the plane-shift.

"How so?"

"Just about the only things I've still got from home are my processor and my core. Everything else is a souvenir from Primus-knows-where. Some pretty… exotic hardware," Lockdown simplified huskily, eyeing his partner. "You sure that stuff won't choke on what you're feeding it?"

Prowl considered it: Lockdown was probably eighty-percent alternate construction, but while he truly had no grasp of whatever bizarre, curvy, fluid-filled mechanisms were propelling the bounty hunter on the inside, basic laws still applied.

"Vibrations of this quality are merely suggestions, not physical force. Anything that functions within an operational mech must and will respond to resonance. All I have to do is find the proper tone," Prowl assured him blankly, still feeling a touch more hesitant than logic said he should. The idea of something malfunctioning due to his ministrations… was not a pleasant one. Though he had trouble finding the frequency again, fumbling slightly with both his servo-positioning and his tone, it only took another cycle of thick concentration for something to go wrong.

Lockdown, before reclining in an uneasy silence, gasped and cursed loudly the moment Prowl touched his Spark-chamber panels, then jerked with a rattling invisible _snap_. White face-plating taut across his gapped teeth, the gigantic mech bucked with a sharp, pained sound, convulsing up to half-curl, half-collapse around Prowl, who had half-tumbled off his hips. Arching to keep the bounty hunter from crushing him, Prowl gasped, a gush of coolant turning his substructure to ice as he gripped at Lockdown's thick neck, pistons hammering in his chassis.

"Lockdown—!" He cried, pressing at his cold body for some response—_any_ response. "Lockd--please, answer me!"

He stayed frozen like that--audio receptors so hot they nearly crackled, listening for a snap or the following spurt of hot blue fluid, Lockdown alarmingly limp against his front--for a good cycle. Then, just like before, when he thought that it couldn't get any more _silent_, that insidious little chuckle bubbled up out of the older mech's insides.

Stung, Prowl nearly snarled in anger, shoving Lockdown off of him in disgust; Lockdown caught himself with a loud clang. He was halfway off the berth before the other mech broke into a full-fledged guffaw, but the bounty hunter managed to catch his wrist so he couldn't go too far. Teasing out the last of his laughter and wincing at the strain to his side, Lockdown shook his head and looked at his partner in a fond, sideways manner that did more to stop Prowl than his grip.

"Come on, kid. I was just yankin' your crank case," he rumbled lazily, settling himself on his berth and looking towards the red-lit ceiling. "Y'can't hurt me. Keep goin'—that didn't feel half-bad."

Lips pinched, Prowl resettled himself with all the nonverbal reluctance in the world, but it became obvious that Lockdown didn't intend to continue with his immature interruptions: he lay surprisingly placid, optic shutters twitching every so often as Prowl touched him.

Finally, thus assured, Prowl went to work on the rest of his partner's body. Sinking into himself, he limited his sensory input to physical contact; that blessed, deaf worldly darkness allowed his other faculties to bloom in the nurturing quiet as he simply _felt_ Lockdown. Prowl, finding (feeling) that compromising pitch again, gently searched his partner's aura, drawing out and kneading the vibrations until they were silky, not choppy and unfocused. Soon, all of him vibrated with the healing energy, the ninjabot's own smooth systems purring underneath the two-way stimulation.

He worked his way down Lockdown's hard-edged, handsome body, fixing and smoothing, but halted at the ragged snarl of his injury. Something had overextended itself and become stuck. The ninjabot explored the stagnant coolness of it, absorbing the way the mechanism resisted the movement of everything around it. Mustering his focus, Prowl pried downwards with a stronger frequency to get at the dark, obstructed place that was hurting the other mech; when whatever it was submitted to the warm coaxing pitch, it was rather like pulling a plug on a drain. Though Prowl couldn't hear it, the part snapped back to rights with a muffled pop. Lockdown made a surprised, tense noise when the reservoir of heavy liquid pain flushed out of him, then settled back into his cool berth with a dusty sigh of relief.

Prowl's job as an artist was not complete. He finished the circuit, clearing out the rest of Lockdown's slightly discordant systems and _feeling_ the tide and rhythm and mechanical chug of the hunter's body bloom into accord, nearly glowing with the shared healthy feeling. Slowly, dotingly, he brushed out the rest of the tiny spiderweb of system snags, adjusting and healing. Finally, after twenty cycles, Prowl ceased to hum--but the warm note stayed in the air, hummed back by Lockdown's glowing, green-ridged body underneath him. Pleased, Prowl smiled and rose up, reactivating his visual, auditory and olfactory circuits and wiping his cheek.

"There. I believe I've fin—"

Prowl fell silent, offered a somewhat rude first sight. Lockdown, still supine and silent between his thighs, was… utterly knocked out.

He certainly wasn't offline—his happy body still purred and thrummed with the tune-up—but he had dropped into stasis during the finishing stages of the clean up and now lay heavily across his berth, two-thousand plus pounds of lethal insentient bulk. Adjusting to the idea, Prowl smirked slightly. Trust Lockdown. Didn't even stay conscious long enough to thank him.

Allowed this strangely clandestine moment with the other mech, Prowl looked at his partner curiously: rarely did he get to see Lockdown when he was peacefully recharging. Though Lockdown would never look harmless or innocent in any stretch of the imagination (even after a full plate-change and an optic-swap), there was a certain dense relief and satisfaction in the relaxed, spike-laden mech that Prowl also found calming and very, very satisfying. Aside from the flushed fulfillment that came from flexing his deeply Sparkful skills, he had helped Lockdown in a truly good way, and there was something to be cherished in that fact.

That, and his partner was… smiling. Very slightly.

It was utterly involuntary, of course—a gooey spillover of the contentedness of his body—but the soft upwards-twitch of the others' severe mouth still amused the ninjabot. Then, without really knowing why, Prowl leaned over his partner until they were chassis-to-chassis and once more pressed his forehead to Lockdown's white brow. The fleshy vibrations humming through them matched perfectly and rejoiced to find a partner in the other. The frequencies swelled together, stronger together than apart, filling Prowl with an instantaneous, smiling calm.

Perhaps it was only natural; perhaps it was only a mechanical physical reaction that didn't merit comment, but it felt… good, being in sync with Lockdown like this. Comforting. Complete. Soothed though he was by the ritual, Prowl let go of all of his remaining tension, simply melting atop the larger mech. His long face fell into the thickness of Lockdown's scented neck, their Spark-plating kissing, and he allowed himself a few more cycles of warm, thrumming, healthy, insentient, ridiculously large comfort before rising and slipping out the door, smiling quietly.

Often, being useful had a secret prize: an improvement of self. Lockdown's pleasant smirk and wryly-impressed look when he booted up a few megacycles later, however, was more than enough for Prowl.


	13. Discussion

A/N: Thanks to Misya for inspiring this chapter with her hypothetical inquiries :3 A darker theme! Lockdown isn't just a grumpy, sexy/pervy old teddybear…? (YES.)

I may do a history chapter (sorta) about this, but that all depends on your theories and interest :D _Thank you so much_ to my very-dedicated reviewers! I SO appreciate your time and words!

* * *

Discussion

* * *

For all his verbosity, Lockdown never conversed.

He talked just to talk; to flex his vocals, or exercise his control without expecting an intelligent return. A hard-edged, hedonistic creature of exhibitionist excess.

Prowl loved conversation. In the middle-time (after he had begun to see Lockdown as a person instead of a hard-handed alien necessity, but before he knew him too well), he had tried to catch Lockdown at odd moments with an open question or three, hoping to perhaps tease a sentence out of him that wasn't a witty rejoinder or a function-oriented direction. The bounty hunter had looked at him like he was malfunctioning, then said so before slouching off to whatever solitary activity would keep the nosy ninjabot away. Prowl stopped trying quickly enough: curious as he was, he was still intelligent. His partner obviously wasn't the 'conversing' type.

The truth was, Lockdown had been around too long to have anything thought-worthy enough to merit a conversation—an equal exchange of ideas—and he flat-out wasn't interested in hearing anyone else's opinion or gooey interpretation of that mystical thing Cybertronians called 'experience of function'. Everything had become instinct of practicality. He was an incarnation of direct cause and effect: efficient, utterly closed to finicky sparkling distortions and questions. He was solid and unquestioning, but utterly adaptive. It must have been comforting, to be so set in one's ways.

Prowl, as quickly as he melted into the shadows of his new life, was still open to interpretation and moral scuffles. He was still young, and had a history of introspection and metaphysical leanings. Lockdown's passive refusal to converse often came across as boorish and dense to him, but he was always reminded soon after just how cutting the bounty hunter's experience and cunning was. The older mech could still learn from physical experiences, but his days of trading philosophical theories were far over—if they ever existed.

Lockdown _told_ Prowl things, of course, and answered his quiet questions when he was in a good mood. He was actually a pleasant storyteller with a wide, imaginative vocabulary-bank, regardless of the usually unsavory subject matter, and enjoyed the way Prowl _experienced_ him when he set to telling a story. He had a bit of an ego, believe it or not, and Prowl's complex attention and inquiries never went unappreciated… except when the nosy ninjabot hit one of his rare uncomfortable buttons.

Lockdown and Prowl rarely fought, and even more rarely _discussed_, but one inevitable subject rendered them completely at odds with one another: the slowly-warming ship under their very pedes.

* * *

One numberless solar-cycle, Prowl rebooted to the sound of Lockdown cursing—which wasn't as common an occurrence as many would think.

As it was still fairly uncommon, Prowl hadn't had time to learn to disregard it, and so slipped off of his berth with a sleepy twist of his hips and padded to the bridge. The bounty hunter had informed him earlier of some maintenance work being done to 'their ride' that solar-cycle, and had dragged Moot (who hadn't been malfunctioning as much as having undue difficulty with some very simple tasks. Her base mechanisms were clogged: as far as Prowl could figure, she was delicately ill and creaking with hairpin adjustment-needs) to the dry reaches of a strange galaxy to have her worked on by a hermit mechanic who specialized in large-scale Cybertronian mechs. Technically the being in question could have been defined as a medic, but the job requirements (and supplies) ballooned exponentially and took on some odd twists when dealing with a Transformer so huge. Still, he was exceptional at what he did, and in messing with something as precious as a nomadic bounty hunter's ship, that was imperative. Lockdown didn't skimp on price where his livelihood was concerned.

His systems fluttering to attention with the mechanical equivalent of a yawn, Prowl slowed curiously when Moot yanked open the bridge door before he was even within twelve spans of it: rushing him in, apparently, and letting Lockdown's furious defamations hit him full-force.

"Slaggin' pile of scrap! I can't make it any clearer, ya floatin' downgrade, just online your fraggin' secondary cruise thrusters and ease in—why the—why the _Pit_ aren't you—Primus--"

Lockdown slammed on the arm of his chair, spitting a few more virulent curses at Moot's forcibly blank screen, then hopped to his pedes and began pounding at the unyielding red-lit buttons that composed her direct action interfacing. When Prowl came in, he immediately glared over his shoulder at the unassuming little 'bot, then froze as a nearly desperate idea lit in his calculating red optics. Drawing himself to his full (devastating) height, Lockdown stomped over, grabbed his partner by the arm and dragged him to the ship's controls, pointing at Prowl and snarling at the screen:

"Will you do it for him, you little tangle of glitches!?"

"What… is going on?" Prowl faltered, squirming minutely to free himself from his overheated (and delicately crazy) partner. Lockdown dropped his arm in the next klik, leaving the ninjabot to step back and notice the compact display of their white desert planet surroundings: in front of the ship stood a towering mechanical cavern of sorts, rimmed with acidic blue lights. Its dark cool throat was thorny with cranes and clamps and drills, protruding from the slick walls like brittle insect legs. Prowl looked at it curiously as Lockdown once more took to ramming whatever instruments could take the shuddering combined force of his weight and his rage.

"The little—she's balkin'!" The bounty hunter railed. "I told her what to do a thousand times—jammed it into her systems, direct function over-ride--and she's not doin' it. Ain't even registering! Gotta be more fragged-up than I thought."

Anger flagging into grim consideration, Lockdown returned to Moot's frantically flashing controls, muttering and grousing about the infinite impossibility of picking up space barnacles in the galaxies they'd been skimming, and so forth. The bounty hunter's chain of thought obviously didn't expand outside the technical possibilities of Moot's obvious malfunction, but Prowl, for several reasons, knew such an approach to be shortsighted. The younger mech gazed around at their ship's red insides, noting a peculiar airless tension tightening around them both as the evidence piled up in his processor: the hurried speed at which she opened the door for him, the irregular flicker and flash of her displays, the strained, sharp whine of her convoluted systems as she didn't ignore, but _resisted_ Lockdown's bludgeoning orders.

She was… anxious.

"Is it painful?" Prowl asked slowly, frowning.

"It's idiotic!" Lockdown hissed, smacking something else. "She's dead in the water, and these techie leeches charge by the megacycle!"

"No—what you are asking her to do. Is it painful?"

"She ain't—" The bounty hunter began heatedly, then pinched the bridge of his nose, half-glaring at Prowl through thinned red optics. "Don't matter. Ship can't feel it, she ain't _sentient_."

"Then why is she shying away?" Prowl demanded, returning the half-glare indignantly. "Whatever level of insentience she operates at, she is obviously frightened!"

Prowl wondered why Moot didn't alert him sooner—perhaps flash the lights in his cabin on and off, or any one of the cockeyed communication tricks she had conjured up in the past—but then again she was also possessed of a very selfless, if undefined and flickering, personality. She probably didn't want to bother him, as distressed as she was, but was quick to usher him in once he had rebooted. Moot was shy in fits and bursts with low self-esteem, if there was such a concept for barely-sentient ships.

"Quit spouting your hypersensitive trash, kid. She ain't _shying_, she's _stalling_. Technical term, ya heard of it? It's what we're here to _fix_, if the damned rustbucket would just budge forward a length or three," Lockdown growled spitefully, still prodding and punching at buttons with a tense irritation—still trying to force her in. "Then again, guess gettin' your insides yanked apart cold turkey would be a downer in any state of sentience."

"A full deconstruction? That's--she needs pain-control," Prowl insisted, normally cool vocals tight in distress as he approached his partner's gigantic chair.

"Ain't dishin' for that," the bounty hunter answered flatly, optics still locked on Moot's slowly shifting screen. "It's an arm extra, for an EMP field that big."

Lockdown neither looked back at him nor failed to mask his nasty irked mutter about how the numb-node trash-heap couldn't _feel_ anything, dumb from the core down; Prowl's servos tightened into fists, truly aggravated at Lockdown's sweeping insensitivity.

"Then I will," the ninjabot snapped, steaming ire topping out. He glared in challenge when Lockdown looked over his spiked shoulder, white face pinched. "Take the extra out of my account. I want her taken care of: she's not to feel a thing."

"You're slaggin' unsalvageable," Lockdown grumbled, raspy vocals dripping in disgust, but stiffly entered in the new teleprompt orders to the impatient by-the-megacycle maintenance crew as Prowl walked to a nearby wall. The young mech surveyed the area for an attentive moment, then placed what he hoped was a comforting servo on the blank stretch of metal, long face still wounded with concern.

"Moot? You need this," he murmured, visor dimming slightly as he projected—from the blue-lit, humming core of himself--his thoughts and sonorous feelings as well as his words. He pressed mentally at the belying metal as though it were porous and riddled with receptors. "Please be cooperative: it's for your health. You will not feel a thing. Please… trust me."

Lockdown, unable to avoid catching the exchange, didn't move to insult his dedicated fancy. Instead, the bounty hunter froze in the uneasy stillness, hunched in his navigator's chair with a starved, half-angry expectancy, red optics fixed on his ship's controls. A reluctant moment later, a rushing sound filled the bridge as Moot slowly powered up her secondary cruise thrusters and eased into the insidious-looking garage with a faintly mournful (but still trusting) tone. Prowl sighed, formerly taut substructure slackening in pleased relief. Lockdown vented a barrelful of hot air with a deep-set rumble of his engine.

"Communication is essential for a relationship of this kind," Prowl said softly, running his slim digits over the warming section of wall, tracing the wandering metal seams as Moot's control panels ceased to flash the frenzied SOS of earlier.

"Unbelievable. Slaggin' unbelievable," Lockdown hissed to himself, clanking back against his chair for a sharp, resentful moment before hunching forward again, bulky body squeezed tight with a mixture of exasperation and concentration as he set upon Moot's control panel. "Let's get this show on the road."

The furious click of keys skittered, paused and clattered on like small insects of sound, curiously loud in the now-silent bridge, even as the frothy rush Moot's red-rimmed thrusters dimmed down. Dense clanking impacts and the crush of airlocks pressed at them from outside as she was docked properly by the faceless mechanics; Prowl had not moved from his place at the wall, and now looked at Lockdown's monstrous back with a distant, careful interest. He waited until the bounty hunter had cursed a few more times (sullenly: his way of winding down and getting the last word) before speaking.

"Lockdown…" He began slowly, one servo testing the air. "Could we… discuss something?"

He doubted Lockdown heard his ridiculously polite request; the approach itself would have earned him a condescending snort and a brusque, businesslike _no_, otherwise. As it was, Lockdown waved him off, grunting out of the corner of his wide mouth:

"Not now, kid." He shot his partner another over-shoulder glance then jabbed an odd digit at him warningly. "But you're not goin' anywhere 'til she's fully docked and her hood is popped for these suckers. Can't handle anymore of her damn _fits_."

Prowl didn't nod; Lockdown was already back at his task. The ninjabot waited in the hollow light spilling in from the garage… and thought over the value of communication as it had been shown to him the past few quiet months. He had been busy, whether or not Lockdown was aware of it, and had one very important conclusion to draw from his prolonged labor: even without this dramatic example of her willpower, it was obvious that Moot was certainly not all dead.

Their diminutive, dense ship had always been… protective of Prowl, and exhibited certain endearing quirks that regular insentient vehicles could not claim. Lockdown explained any anomalies away with a grunt and a swat of his huge servo (or an accusatory glare at his partner), but the difference lay, the ninjabot hoped, in the very cosmos around them. It was said that the Well of Allsparks was the universe, and the universe—every iota—held all and none of the Well. While Moot was dead in the technical sense (no robust steaming snowball of Spark energy throbbed in her) she may have been a prime example of a rare but undebunked theory of energy build-up. A case was reported every century or so, much like a common myth, but the ninjabot had to suspend the cold machinations of his logic drive in this case.

The reports held that the cumulative Spark energy flowing in the universe around an insentient transportation Cybertronian, if given enough time and direct stimulation, could… stick to them, imbuing them not with a full-fledged Spark but licks of sentient energy. Prowl had researched the phenomena and found the rumored results to fit: Spark-touched ships stirred as a ghost of their former selves and exhibited a conscious, willing warmth. A personality. Even before he had solid proof, Prowl was convinced Moot was more than a creature of cold mechanics, attuned as he was to energy and vibrations. She was fond of him: he could feel it, even if he couldn't explain why; she had certainly never said so, as she wasn't capable of words.

That fact proved a larger barrier than Prowl could imagine when she actually made the complex, confused (and often stunning) leap to _communicating_ with him instead of simply doing odd, affectionate things for him.

The first time she reached out to him, her dazed shyness warmed him in a way he thought he'd forgotten and filled him with the rare thrill of a _secret_. Prowl, safe in his cramped chamber for megacycles on end, immediately set to helping her through his keen ability to listen. It was a slow and trying task, attempting to make sense of her… methods, but Prowl possessed patience aplenty, and a nature-lover's silent curiosity where that failed. It took him a long while to coax her past the basic joy of making contact with him and into an actual exchange, but they progressed amiably from there so long as he was able to direct her whimsy.

Curiously, the first thing she sent to him was an impression—a striking conclusion that crept into his core, resonating out from her warming walls—of age. It was a very, very old feeling; ancient, and possessed of a dangerous, grinding edge. Prowl couldn't imagine why she would speak of herself in such a way, but with repetitions (clarifying the garbled gush of emotional, innard-tingling static with every new try) a distant tone surfaced. Impersonal. The quiet ship was not referring to herself, but someone—or something—else. The only other resident in their red-lit world.

Lockdown.

There were… other messages as well. Once they established a way to identify the only other creature in their fused lives, rather than the physical 'you' and 'me', she became riled up in her wordless, soundless way (seeming to rediscover the bounty hunter now that he had a metaphysical 'name') but managed to siphon a few more feelings into Prowl before her whispering sentience shorted out. She expanded the concept of dark Lockdown (hard, white and black and green, rumbling) with a confused fear, saturated with a slow, creaking, too-large-to-think-about anger. That surprised Prowl, but part of it was only natural for her muddled state: she had enough creeping sentience to blindly resent Lockdown for the manner in which he treated her, and the sentiment cycled and festered in her dusty, crippled faculties until it bloated out of proportion. Childish, but understandable; Prowl would not think too kindly of his charming partner either, were he in Moot's position.

Once she snagged that line of non-thought, he had begged her to slow down—she was flooding him with her Spark-like pulses and unformatted scraps of data, shoving them into his field and crying for him to make sense of them—and she stalled, retreating once more into her dense, floating uncertainty at the timid upset. Prowl was forced to wait for solar-cycles before he could contact her again, and even then she had no technical memory of her attempt to explain her feelings for the bounty hunter; she greeted him with a blank pleasure. Moot had no strength, obviously needed direction and was easily spooked, but she was once a battle-worthy, capable femme, and her love for him was palpable.

So were her warnings.

It failed to set Prowl on edge, as he knew he was dealing with the mental equivalent of an ardent but befuddled Sparkling, but he still had to admit the strangeness of it. Once Lockdown had been identified, the final impression she usually sent him after one of their 'feels' (rather than 'talks') was a reverberating, serrated warning. Prowl attempted to talk to her about it; he plied her, asking her with a soft hum of rational doubt to reconsider and calm down. Surely, the bounty hunter was inconsiderate and often mean to her, but that didn't merit such thoughtless animosity. She refused his coaxing, relentless and strangely _focused_, and before her smear of consciousness faded with a sigh from the reaches of his energy-field (it exhausted her as much as him), she always warned him.

It was all quite confusing and brought up a host of questions in Prowl's usually serene inner workings. Content notwithstanding, Lockdown didn't usually retreat from his questions. Now, with this explicit display of willpower and Moot's age-distorted impressions lingering in his core, Prowl could not walk away from this opportunity to… approach another source, even if it meant exposing their secret.

He waited for Lockdown to finish with an attentive silence. After the sounds outside changed to a sharper tone (if warped by the subsonic warble of Prowl's expensive EMP field) with the deconstruction fully underway, the bounty hunter sat back. Prowl twined his digits together. After a few moments of nothing, Lockdown turned his chair around, alerted to his partner through his continued presence rather than a sense of responsibility to the ninjabot's earlier inquiry, and pinned Prowl with a long look.

"Whaddya need?" He asked, settling back in the thick, scuffed metal cradle. Prowl glanced at the floor, but managed to meet Lockdown's blank gaze. He aspirated briefly.

"What is your… length of function?"

Few questions could have caught the bounty hunter so off-guard. He stopped, stared, then stopped again, pale face-plating tightening up in creeping suspicion. Prowl, for one, didn't usually ask him personal questions: either the stories came out in the course of their life, or they didn't come out at all. The little ninjabot knew enough about him to respect his thorny privacy and not… pry.

"Why d'you wanna know?" He grunted finally, eyeing his partner carefully.

Prowl couldn't say just yet, but he remembered something… something to do with what had happened before, on Earth. It was a shocking revelation, but it made sense, with what Moot sent to him--

"You were in the Great Wars," Prowl began uncertainly. Reaching.

Lockdown gave a perfunctory grimace.

"…Yeah," he answered, short and hazy, scratching his spike-studded neck with his new red-cast left servo. "Good times, those. Lots of business."

He was as old or older than Ratchet. Though it had been freely implied since the beginning… the actual realization made Prowl feel a bit sick. A bit lost.

"How long have you been online, Lockdown?" Prowl repeated faintly.

"Millennia or two." The bounty hunter shrugged, then finished gruffly: "Maybe twelve."

Prowl was recorded at two hundred and sixty-seven stellar-cycles of function.

"I'm—" he gasped, visor stretched wide.

"Young. Real young," Lockdown chuckled, regarding his stunned, stutter-soaked little partner from half-closed optics. He raised a servo, waving it in the face of Prowl's barren, stinging shock. "Age is just a number, huh? Don't let that clog your carburetor, kid. I can still go from zero to sixty in—"

He broke off with a nasty, indulgent grin, looking his partner up and down.

"Pit, you don't need t'be told."

Struck wordless, Prowl looked down at his knees, wrapped in sudden disquiet. Lockdown waited. As smoothly as he'd changed the subject, the bounty hunter had every right to be slightly irritated at Prowl for not rising to his bait as the cycles ticked on—further so when the quiet little ninjabot looked up again, asking softly:

"How did you meet Moot?"

Lockdown smacked his fist on his chair with a disgusted sound, good mood crumpled.

"Would'ja quit fraggin' talkin' about her like she's sentient?" He snapped. "She's been dead for eons. I _bought_ her, you bleeding Spark. What, d'you think I knew her before she turned into a numb-node carrier?

His tone was odd.

"_Autobot or Decepticon?"_

_She vacillated. Squinted. Strained helplessly. He tried again, projecting the clean, bold, blocky feel of the Autobot crest with the lilt of a question. The question—the cold, factual differentiation between the two sects—didn't make sense to her, but the material was relevant. She backed away, digging somewhere. He felt her consciousness retreat slightly, then she swelled forward, proffering… of all things, an image._

_Explosions. Howling disorientation in a black sky. A self-conscious, ripe concern, not for herself but for something or someone inside her red shell. There had been dialogue, he was sure, but the loss of her Spark had stripped it, and Prowl was left with bludgeoning impacts and a carnage-strewn, panic-filled war scene that disappeared (with a wrenching pain and blossom of hysteria, the end) as quickly as it touched his field, leaving an acidic smoking sensation._

_That, and… the musky scent of an oil he knew very, very well._

_The communication leap and the content within was beyond belief. He instantly reached out to her, taut and anxious with this ragged discovery and already yearning for more, but she was dark and gone._

Prowl pressed on.

"How many eons? How much did you pay for her?"

The kid's rapid questions made him give in out of apathy, flat and flinty. Lockdown shook his head slowly, pulling at words.

"…Forty thousand."

"That's a low figure," Prowl said softly.

"It was a lot back then," the bounty hunter grunted.

"You took a moment to answer."

Prowl knew Lockdown's exacting nature: he knew, from watching his meticulous calculations concerning money, that the bounty hunter remembered every deca-credit he'd ever spent in his life. Moot, if she was indeed purchased, was no small investment. The pause was forced. Lockdown ground his gapped teeth and vented some dry air before heaving himself to his pedes and turning to Moot's control panel, giving his partner a good view of his dark, abominably wide back.

"You're awful curious about this. The Pit got under your hood, kid? What does it matter t'you? She's a _ship_. Piece'a furniture. Got her Spark doused 'fore you were a statistic in Vector Sigma's display screen. She does her job and that's all that matters," Lockdown said roughly, simply standing at the sweeping array of levers and buttons, arms crossed. "She ain't your friend, she's a bucket of insentient bolts with a few leftover impulses. Death rattles. You act like…"

Lockdown froze. Prowl couldn't see his expression, but when the bounty hunter spoke again a few crawling moments later, his vocals were still as gravelly and deep as ever, but infinitely more cautious.

"She been… talkin' to you?"

Prowl never thought about how he would answer when asked. Vigilant Lockdown didn't like anything to go on in his domain without his knowledge, and punishment for Prowl's activities was more than a possibility. Tactful as he was, however, the truth tumbled out in the resulting silence, powered with concern and true curiosity as Prowl nearly spoke to himself, gesturing faintly at the dry, red-lit air.

"Slightly. Perhaps. I… I do not understand half of it, but she is… making an attempt to reach out with feelings and images. It's astounding, Lockdown." He looked up, a half-smile on his long face. "I'm able to _register_ her. She can actually—"

Lockdown had always been sensitive about the fact that she wasn't sentient. There was no clear reason why. The ninjabot assumed it to be his aversion to the whimsy of it, and perhaps Prowl didn't expect his partner to become jubilant at the idea of Moot waking up in a small sense from her long, heavy nonexistence… but what he certainly didn't expect was the sudden clench of the bounty hunter's huge fist and the hot anger—outrage--in his face as he turned, every tensor taut and bristling.

Two differing clanks dropped like coins in the bridge: Lockdown advanced, Prowl retreated blindly.

"Just how stupid are you?" He rasped.

He didn't expect a response.

Prowl's shocked stumble earned him nothing but a physical flare of rage. Lockdown, mismatched servos hooked, strode over and pinned Prowl to the bridge door with nothing but the dark surge of his approach. The two never touched, but the suffocating press of the bounty hunter's hissing energy field at his chassis was enough, especially when Lockdown's open servo smashed into the door, imbedded right above Prowl's head. Prowl shrank from the swift, hard-edged assault, confusion scrambling his relays and any attempts to fight back: Lockdown glared down at him, rumbling down to his hard engine.

"D'you have any idea what you're doin'?" He demanded, vocals dangerously quiet. Stunned, Prowl found his own vocals, faint and uncertain as he tried to hold Lockdown's smoldering glare.

"I'm—I don't understand," he murmured nervously. "I haven't done anything—"

"The Pit you haven't—!"

When the younger mech flinched away, a pulse of real trepidation coursing through his tight substructure, Lockdown reached to grab his chin, all snarl and teeth and crushing grip—but the door they were crunched against suddenly opened with a ship-wide warning siren, red and inflamed, sending both tumbling into the hallway with a series of hard crashes. Propelled by his partner's weight, Prowl was thrown farther down; Lockdown grunted in pain as he hit, then roared as the door-panel slammed down on his side with a vengeful strength, pinning him sharply to the floor. He muscled it up, cursing deafeningly, and dragged his huge body past the doorway. It snapped shut with a cold clang.

Both lay somewhat stunned in the dark, splayed on the floor or curled against the wall, aspirating roughly, until they realized—one with a gush of fury, the other with a pang of anxiety—what had just happened.

_It happened in little things, like a door sticking. Little system glitches came far too often, far too opportunely, and always featured Prowl on the other side. It was as close as Lockdown came to admitting her sentience when railing against her fragged, scrambled hard drive the third time she refused him entry to Prowl's room when he was beyond furious at something the ninjabot hadn't exactly done. Immovable and cold, she sealed Prowl from the enemy. Protected him._

_Say what he would, Lockdown knew it-- and it only made him angrier._

"_Please, you must stop acting on my behalf. He will find out about you: I'm worried for your safety."_

She worried blindly, unable to tell Lockdown's dangerous moods from his darkly playful vendettas; thrashing to protect her darling Prowl. Now was no exception. Prowl looked down fearfully at Lockdown's spiked shadow as the bounty hunter heaved himself to his knees, red optics flashing.

"_That's it_!"

Reignited, Lockdown bent down and swept Prowl to his feet with a close-mouthed roar and thrust him sharply against the wall, thick servo jammed just under his tender chest-plating.

"Lockdown, please—that was not--"

"Quit hacking with my ship, Prowl," he hissed, sharp white face nanometers from Prowl's own. "I bought her, I own her, and you're way outta line if you think you got any right to her. She was never _like this_ before, and I don't know how you've crammed your greasy little cyberninja servos in her wiring, but take my word for it: you don't want this ship to wake up."

He never could have imagined this would happen. Impossible. Stupidly far-fetched. Never would have let him on, he lied to himself, if he'd had any inkling of the damage the kid would wreak on his safe, cold, _subdued_ ship.

As it was, he'd ignored it in the creeping months previous. Their… thing. He couldn't see the danger, even if the change set him on edge. The damned doused femme could flash and beep and _imply_ all she wanted—he could ignore and explain that away, mollified by the pleasure Prowl got out of her, even deal with her snotty disobedience every so often--but when it came to actual communication, Lockdown wouldn't allow it.

Couldn't allow it. That was a line that couldn't be crossed, both for his sake and Prowl's.

He shook the kid, absorbing (without satisfaction) the way Prowl half-gasped and grabbed at his meaty wrists.

"If she wakes up, all'a this is gone—you get me? All of it. I had her memory core professionally wiped for a reason," Lockdown snarled. He took a charring moment to stare directly into Prowl's flickering blue-grey visor. "And if you undo that, I'm tossin' you."

He removed his servo from Prowl's cold chassis; the young mech clattered to the ground, delicate knees giving out. Flat on the floor, he quailed in his quiet, Prowl-ish way, still pinned between the bounty hunter's heavy, looming body and the wall.

"L-Lockdown, I--" he began haltingly, all thoughts ripped away, one servo cupped pleadingly. Lockdown glowered down at him, unmoved by his acute crushing (_young)_ rush of regret and dread.

Kid didn't know. That didn't matter.

Had to make it clear.

"Gal's been nice and quiet for three-thousand plus, and I want that to stay the same. This 'preference' thing you're infectin' her with is pissin' me off, and I won't hesitate to make it stop: whatever that means to you, respect it. I run this show. She stays dead, and you stay away."

Lockdown crouched, clanking and scraping thickly, and braced an arm flush against the wall closest to his partner's head, closing in as Prowl arched away. He grasped his partner's chin (the kid winced), once more staring coldly into Prowl's thinned, humming visor.

"I'm a pretty fun 'bot to work with, kid, but I'll take stability over good times any day," he rasped forcefully, tightening his grip despite Prowl's faint protest. "Don't cross me."

As Lockdown rose and left him in the dark of the hallway, shaking unconsciously from the sting of shock and those hard servos on his body, Prowl was once again forced to think about certain things. Looming, empty things, much like Lockdown's age, that were all too easy to ignore with their hearty rapport (his partner's growing affection, the greased churn of their success) but had been brought back to the surface with Lockdown's first real threat in their thirty-four stellar-cycle partnership.

It was impossible. All of it.

The way Prowl had _waited_—suspended his disbelief even after he was slammed to a wall, neglecting to lash out or neutralize the very real physical situation—was… impossible. Why had he done it? Why didn't he move to save himself, when he had become so sensitized to the possibility of danger _at any moment with anyone _and all the signs of violence were impending if not present?

It was how he would have reacted, Prowl realized with a sinking sensation, if Optimus Prime had done the same thing.

If those glossy, blocky blue servos had grappled at his shoulder-plating and thrust him against a wall, he would not have fought back. He would have waited, hoping there was a reason. Respecting. Trusting his judgment. Trusting unconditionally, like an awe-struck Sparkling, just as he had a moment ago… when Lockdown was still the amoral half-criminal he had been when he took Prowl on.

Still very capable of killing him.

No, he had waited and ignored and abided in the starry hopes that the bounty hunter's feelings for him—however convoluted and lust-encrusted after thirty-four stellar-cycles—would stay Lockdown's hand if it came to violence. But… what feelings?

Whatever they were, they certainly wouldn't prevent him from abandoning Prowl. He had said so; threatened him. Nothing would endanger his livelihood. Nothing.

Practical. So practical.

He couldn't think about Moot. He couldn't think about the thorny fact of Lockdown's age, a quietly nauseating weight in his processor. He couldn't think about what he had or hadn't done wrong, or who was telling the truth. He had betrayed himself. Let himself fall, with smiling banter, real respect and misleading nights spent crushed against a hot black chassis; with a sidelong _happiness_, into a trap only pampered pedestrians were allowed: real trust.

And that was only because they were too stupid to comprehend the peril of it.

Feeling a little bit more lost and sick than he had in his darkened life, Prowl waited for an end to the Spark-draining weakness. The reality of it kept the young, foolish ninjabot slumped against the wall for another echoing megacycle, and when his huge invisible friend brushed at his faltering field with a meek, crumbling question, he didn't answer.

He never did.


	14. Sometimes

A/N: Prowl gets depressed (and so do you XD). No, bounty-hunting life isn't all outrageous interfacing, witty banter and fun hunts :3 Our ninjabot was once a very good 'bot, and he's missing that moral commodity. Meanwhile, Lockdown still expects him to remain professional in all senses. Ooh.

This is a step back. Around the 10-year mark of these two, or close. Juuuust enough time for Prowl to be wretchedly unsure of everything around him.

(I know, I know, no plot advancement. Next chapter is exciting and very worth it, promise! Thank you again for reading! :snug: You have no idea how excited I got about all the Moot-theories XD You guys make my brain work for a living! Till next week)

* * *

Sometimes

* * *

He hated Lockdown, sometimes.

The feeling—unwelcome, putrid, professionally impossible—surfaced only in the dark. In the wandering stellar-cycles of his new survival (not life), there were times when he felt lost and staggeringly _alone_ (not solitary) in his world. Sharp and sudden, Prowl missed those he had called friends and the short, sweet life they embodied.

Earth.

The daily flow and churn of pliant, nature-kissed existence. Detroit sunlight; the swooping overpasses and the crayon-green parks. Alien city, utter acceptance; green, yellow, blue and white plating. He remembered a smooth concrete base burgeoning with all forms of brightly-colored furor and the footsteps (yellow, buoyant and so eager) of an attention-voracious little imp, skittering and pattering between every room… doting on each of them in her own sharp-tongued, soft-skinned way. He remembered _home_ and kept his optics off-lined so he wouldn't be forced to face the barren dark of his cargo-hold existence.

At times, he didn't know whether the memories would save him or kill him.

It was a nostalgia just as impossible then as it was when he was sitting in the ruins of their Detroit base, the acidic black smoke of the end of an era clotting around him: that life was destroyed far before he had ever agreed to Lockdown's proposition. It simply seemed… even more pristine, now; farther away, and lit with a buttery sanctified light. It destroyed him a little, to turn it over in his memory core, even though—especially since—it didn't make him think about the grey war and his own acts, including the last. It was just quiet, natural happiness.

In those odd moments where the myriad distractions of his new life proved empty, his brutal selfishness (a robust and flexible shell that could last for months, brought to shine by his oily satisfaction and a certain Undecided's wicked encouragement) became tired and cracked from the cold space air and constant travel and Lockdown's silence. Exposed and inundated, he wilted, quailed, curled up. These weak moments occurred more often at the beginning of his bounty-hunting life—and most often when they had just wordlessly delivered a young, up-and-coming social reformist, two terms strong in his battle against a rampant crime syndicate, to the fluid-spattered basement of the same syndicate's smiling leader.

Faced with those moments, Prowl regained the lamentable ability to feel. He felt horror, emptiness, and disgust, and his shields—his defenses and chilly logic coding—became a foreign entity.

Lockdown did it without a twitch. Lockdown strode forward, pushed the disheveled, weeping being into the waiting limbs of the dark-clothed flunkies… and simply held out his servo. He destroyed the hopes of half the continent, and all he did was grunt for his payment. It was astounding, sickening, how the flinty needs of one mech could ransack a century of progress.

Facing his crimes, Prowl felt wantonly destructive. Hateful. Impersonally evil. He told himself in the beginning that peace could exist in neutrality: that even if he was not explicitly for any one cause, he could avoid harming any others he sympathized with. But there was no room for such whimsy. Damage, the kind they peddled, was neutral: but what was damage if not negative?

Missions like those didn't come along very often, admittedly. It was more of an open market: bounties were posted on a continuous frequency-feed by governments, monarchies and rich independents, available to anyone anywhere with the proper armory. Lockdown and Prowl had their pick of hits. Price and competition were considered, distances (and dangers) were judged, and their decision rose as a cumulative cloud from all of those factors.

Official bounties weren't placed without a good reason (whatever the definition of 'good' was in subsector space wastelands), and Prowl could face those missions with apathy if not satisfaction. On those days, they did well—they did '_good'_, though Lockdown faced every job with the same smirking anticipation. It was the down-and-out jobs, the dirty, meticulous, _intimate _vendettas they had to take when no promising, subliminally positive bounty shone on Moot's screen… that wrenched at his Spark.

They needed energon. They needed oil; they needed weapons. None of that came without money.

When large bounties weren't on the market, they had no option but to _survive_. Still, Lockdown made the final decision on what target to chase, and that right wasn't without consequences for the silently hypercritical ninjabot. It wormed into his opinion of the bounty-hunter, even though the other truly had no choice—and it was for both his sake and Prowl's. No, Prowl's darkened mentality tried to make his partner more of a villain than he was, decorating his mind with hateful reasons to feed his gloomy despair, although Lockdown hardly needed the demonization to stir disgust and resentment, some days.

Lockdown himself was still Lockdown, as Ratchet had seen him in the cramped, filthy corridors of the Great War. He was still an amoral monster with a grinning religion of licentiousness and an armory of dirty habits. He still taunted and chuckled at prone prisoners' honest plight; he still took trophies. Prowl stayed away when the old mech set to his newest catch with an artistic buzz-saw, but even after he retreated to his quarters, he was unable to filter out the whiny, accusatory note of any one of Lockdown's extraction tools as he hacked and pried at all colors of thick mech plating. The bounty hunter set to butchering his prisoners with a fulfilled grin, carnage-besotted, perhaps laboring alongside a jaunty stolen radio signal, jazz vomiting out his speakers.

Prowl honestly had no hopes of changing the ancient mech (he knew his situation: he was an abided intruder and a barely-trusted investment) but to see something so indecent time after time and to know that his partner gained such pleasure and pride from it… was disquieting and disheartening. It made him doubt his staggering decision and left him in the dark. Prowl had been… good, once: who was he living and laboring with? It always turned his thoughts around, to see that explicit display of violence--and more often than not, wretchedly endeared to the hunter by a handful of stellar-cycles and scalding imitations of intimacy, he needed the reality check. Desperately.

Yes, he hated Lockdown sometimes: especially when those huge servos slid up and gorged themselves on his cream thighs, rubbing with a lazy expertise. Prowl cringed when the bounty hunter's hot, humming mouth scraped against his slender neck, green-striped bulk a vibrating press of heat and heavy life at his aft.

"You look like you're stallin' for somethin'."

Prowl twisted in a slow, dull attempt to free himself, but did nothing more than turn his head aside with an injured expression when his huge partner took to nipping the sensitive gold-brushed base of his wings with a delighted rumble.

"Lockdown, please…" he murmured in a suffering tone, feeling despair and revulsion couple in his dimly lit Spark-chamber. He squirmed tryingly against the bench he was seated on, but Lockdown's chassis pinned him from the back.

"C'mon. Don't be like that," Lockdown returned mischievously, practiced servos grating up to press and stroke at the wire-kissed cusps of the ninjabot's pelvic plating with a sweeping, grinning _assumption_. Stung, Prowl went frigid in his grip, engulfed in his own stiff, laboriously cultured resentment; despising everything from Lockdown's graceless, bold lechery to his arrogant _ways_; the brutal feel of his body to his addiction to excess.

Who was he, a quiet, controlled and fortified soul, engulfed by such a disgusting paradigm of arrogant decadence, who used him physically, sexually? There was a lens-flare of shame to the demand in the fact he had allowed himself to _enjoy_ it for so long, but it only stoked the embers of confused but strident loathing.

But of course, he was quiet. Quiet, fortified and controlled.

Prowl _abided_, cold nausea pulsating in his innards, and his partner continued to molest him with bloated, ignorant pleasure, scattered crushes of mouth (kisses?) some sort of excuse for the indecent push and pry of his digits. Brutal, uncaring, _reprehensible_. Perhaps Lockdown noticed a stagnant hint of something in the usually pliant ninjabot, but Prowl was also abominably quiet when they indulged in each other, so he didn't know too much; didn't think to know the complex rash of insinuations Prowl was fabricating and whittling to razor-sharp points.

Half-hints. Undetected implications that only sealed Lockdown's doom, so unjustly; secret requirements, with which Prowl set him up for calculated failure.

Engrossed only in the one-dimensional act of the present, Lockdown pressed wantonly against his seated partner and scraped his thick digits across Prowl's chamber-plating; his looming, invisible leer spoke clearly of his intent to rile. Prowl, finally unable to contain himself and his quiet biting month-long outrage, murmured frigidly:

"If this is your idea of respect, I may have been better off on Earth."

Lockdown's servo froze, then carefully drew away from Prowl's cold black plating, hanging in the air like a boneless arachnid.

"You didn't say stop."

It wasn't conniving. It was factual: even accusatory. Indignant, nervous static spat in Prowl's auditory units. Lockdown's hovering servo clanged down on the bench beside Prowl's leg, vocals a notch rougher, body unyielding at the ninjabot's back.

"I don't stop until you say the word stop: we agreed on that."

Prowl twisted invisibly, discomfited at such brusque negotiations. It was a safety word: a way to make certain that Lockdown never forced truly himself on his smaller partner. Rather, an excuse, when it was so glaringly obvious that he wanted nothing more than to be left alone. When the disdainful silence only stretched on, souring so quickly between their scraping bodies as Prowl's earlier (devastating) insult sunk in, Lockdown pressed him again, sincerely growling at this point.

"Anything else, whining and screaming included, is up for interpretation, kid. I don't pretend to know what turns you on."

"My apologies. I assumed you to be more discerning than that," Prowl countered dully, visor fixed on a single point on the floor. "I did not presume intimacy to be the conscientious course of action when your companion explicitly begs you away—"

"I don't stop until someone says the word," Lockdown snarled, hard-edged rumble hitting Prowl from the tender curve of his back and his audio units as his partner lurched forward, one servo clamping onto his unarmored shoulder. The bounty hunter wrenched him back a notch, leaving Prowl to glare at the ceiling as he rasped on. "I'm willin' to back off when you want it—_that's_ respect--but you don't make up new rules and expect me to sync up with your twisted little processor. Don't play your slaggin' mind-games with me, brat."

It was said scathingly, as though Prowl was the most immature, petty, manipulative, fit-throwing youngling in the universe. And… at the moment, he was. He had practically begged Lockdown to make it a confrontation by handling the entire exchange so childishly. Provoking. Goading, so irrationally. He let the physicality go on longer than it should have, just to feed his personal vendetta; just to give himself… a reason. A reason to hate Lockdown.

Please. He needed to hate someone so badly.

Prowl made a small, stunned noise as Lockdown pushed him free and rose to his full height, glaring down at his suddenly hunched partner with something close to loathing in his gaunt face.

"This is a deal: takes cooperation from two sides. If you aren't satisfied with somethin' here, it's 'cos you're not doin' your part, _partner_," Lockdown hissed. "I sure as Pit always do mine."

Prowl's partner strode out of his dark quarters, door snapping shut behind him. Done. Finished.

Prowl, _alone alone alone_, sat soaked with a shame as hateful as it was wretched. Toothy inner prejudice disintegrated, he was ashamed for having tried to lure honest Lockdown out: he understood the conditions. Always had. He had made a miserable fool of himself, trying to squirm and imply the situation into something offensive and personal when… it simply wasn't. It wasn't personal.

Any of it.

No, he had used the other mech and whatever else came into his mad grasp in a desperate bid for someone to blame. Even then, when used as a weapon, the factual bite and measure of their relations—the concrete restrictions, the calculated safety word--always depressed him more than it should have. It was but one more… empty cause he could add to his dim Spark. Yet another lusterless facet of the dark, trustless life he had condemned himself to with a single, long-ago word: yes.

Sometimes, he hated Lockdown--but it was never more than he hated himself.


	15. Components

A/N: Mehehe. Anxious Lockdown is anxious. (Please forgive my technical mumbo-jumbo. Please. You know me: I only does it for the robot love.)

Yay, meaningful chapter! Trauma+cuteness is WIN!

(Oh! You'll have to forgive me for wrapping up the Moot-LD-history issue later: we have to meet one more person from Lockdown's past before you can see him in his full pre-Great War glory! Just consider it an uneasy, depressing armistice for now.)

* * *

Components

* * *

Prowl had to admit: the catch was well-earned.

He hadn't made any mistakes. It had been pure skill and preparation on the part of his opponents that led him to his current… predicament. Somewhere, someone had let leak that Lockdown was on arms-master Blend's trail in the name (paycheck) of the Interstellar arms-trafficking bureau and Blend had responded accordingly. Either that, or his convoluted base came equipped with the best Cybertronian-specific system-scrambling security set-up money (or blood) could buy.

They had proceeded with due caution, but even when warned of Blend's infamously prepared nature and posse of stimulant-paid alien employees, Lockdown still allowed a split-up. Everything went acceptably until it simply didn't. After sparsely-lit corridors and easily-dodged sentries, a well-placed ambush team and an electrified, 'circuit scrambling' floor panel had ended the slick calculations of Prowl's battle computer in three white, blistering nanokliks. After that, it had been small work to bundle the stunned ninjabot into a tarp and drag him to an enclosed area to torture and possibly sell into servitude—there were many who would pay a pretty price for such a slick model once his databanks were properly wiped.

Of course, he had given them the proper amount of trouble upon rebooting (to the tune of ripping out of the tarp and disabling a good five of them with his sharp heels and the bludgeoning slam of his shield-mod), but that was neither here nor there. It was a clean catch: he had been good prey and they good hunters. Acknowledgment of his opponents' planning skills, however selfless, did nothing for the chilly, snapping downhill slide of his systems.

After all, they were forced to subdue him and they did. A little… overenthusiastically.

Prowl sat with his back against the blackened wall, hunched over, pushing draft after shaking draft through his vents: there was an alarmingly wet sucking sound squelching from his battered abdominal section with each drag at the dry, explosive-laced air, but that was only to be expected. His captors (tall, vicious creatures with swollen, gnarled joints and claws, some piled high with mauve pustules from the hyperaddictive drugs Blend compensated them with) paced and kicked around him. Their invisible superior hadn't answered their call in at least half a megacycle and a foreboding hush had infected the small base. They hadn't resorted to abusing him out of nerves yet, but the taut click and twitch of their bony bodies and lidless split-pupil eyes promised a forthcoming development of the sort.

Prowl didn't know where Lockdown was. His level of despondency (bloating into a weighty terror as his partner failed to come and the cycles ticked on) was threatening the cognizant Circuit-su-based attempts to stabilize his more vital, fluid- and pressure-fueled mechanics. The stinging, stabbing, lancing, grinding pain was enough of an technical interference, of course, but Prowl worked with what he was given.

Despite his practiced stillness, something snapped (further). The crumpled ninjabot cried out, jerking in his hastily-tied bonds. Then he held perfectly still, long face warped with airless pain, until the creature who had stalked over at his noise lowered its cartilege-crowned foot: another kick would dislodge something unthinkable. The second the thing turned away, Prowl let out a ragged aspiration, visor thinning to an agonized sliver of dirty blue. His functions fell yet another sluggish notch.

Lower, lower, lower.

Slowly, the trussed-up mech became aware of a dark clamor, funneled steadily towards their closed-off room like chaos in a pipe; his captors began stirring from the first sounds of gunfire, but Prowl's stimuli field was so limited (thrumming radius drained by the drip of his innards) that it was right outside the triple-barred door before he looked up.

Then his pink-glazed mouth twitched at a particular thundering double-slam of a rather dashing plasma canon he had helped equip that very morning.

A thick foot came out of nowhere and pegged him in the side. Though barely goading, it was enough to make his tired ventilation systems back up. Prowl coughed, looking blearily up at the alien who was snarling gibberish at him. Even his translation software was lagging, the red haze of his warning screens only assisting the comprehension problem.

"What is your joy?" The thing demanded, mistrustfully noting Prowl's strange new calmness. The ninjabot, visor flickering haltingly, sat back against the wall with undue ease, no longer hunched over with acrid stress and fear.

"My partner is coming," he rasped.

"And then?" The being strained closer, even as its wet eyes flickered back to the rattling door and the noisy death on their very doorstep. Prowl swallowed against the suffocating swell of energon in his cold tubing and allowed himself a hazy half-smile.

"My partner is notoriously ill-tempered."

As if on cue, the doors slammed open, admitting two-thousand plus pounds of vengeful, gun-blazing mech.

Lockdown was, as was well-known, a one-mech army. Prowl never had a chance to truly appreciate his ruthlessness until that moment, especially its virulent brilliance in such a contained area. He sagged against the wall, a gnat in the face of the speedy, deafening carnage, only straining away a handful of times as his partner's plate-rattling plasma canon sent nauseating feedback into his malfunctioning audio receptors. Once the room was cleared (and filthy with wet, singed bodies) the bounty hunter walked up to Prowl and holstered the still-throbbing canon and Primus knew what else, dark plating smeared with fatty organic insides and grumbled archly:

"Nice to see you kept up your half of the mission."

Not missing a beat, Lockdown cocked the other device and turned to send a tapered bolt of metal thunking into a noisy creature about to charge through the door and assault them; the thing fell with a garbled, blood-doused howl, squirming to a sloppy stop on the floor. Lockdown reloaded.

"Y'know your comm signal's out?"

He said it gruffly, casually, when there was a horrible sparking hole in Prowl's cranium where the creatures had crunched in and _grabbed_ and torn out tender wires so he wouldn't be able to call for help. Prowl smiled weakly.

"I h… had suspected as much."

His burly partner stalked to the door, shouting something out into the hallway to the next wave of flunkies ("Game's over! I bagged your damn ring-leader, back off—") then slammed the doors and barred them again with several booming sounds. Absently scraping the gore off his servos, he returned to the ninjabot, still feebly slumped against the wall, visor emitting a bare flicker of blue.

"You still operational, kid?" Lockdown asked slowly, optics lingering on the ponderous flutter of Prowl's rope-bound chassis and slack neck. He clanked down to his knees, reaching for the restraints. "Primus, you're wrapped up like a fraggin' construction day gift--"

Prowl stirred painfully, bucking as much as he could.

"Lockdown, _n-no_—"

Prowl twisted to stop him as the bounty hunter, with a slash of his saw, cut through the rough rope that was wound so tightly around his chest-plating, but it happened too quickly. The bonds snapped off and the front of his chassis split away like a slice of glossy black fruit. The unreal, sparking piece of him slid down his front as though greased and clattered onto the filthy floor, one third of Prowl's hot central bisected systems fizzling and clicking in the quivering black bowl.

Subduing him had meant partial evisceration: only meaning to slice off a limb or two for a calming effect, his opponents caught him with a cutting laser. He twisted midair and the beam had lanced across his chassis, severing a fifteen-pound slice of himself in one excruciating red flash. He supposed he should have thanked them for shoving his insides back in place and binding his chest-plating with the rope, but his decorum programming was the first to scatter when his battered body began to spiral, red-screened and shuddering, into full-system failure.

He should have told Lockdown sooner; warned him, even though words were a horribly hazy struggle with his verbal banks and language processor half-severed from his core. But now cut wires were slopping out like metal moss and filthy mingling liquids gushed onto the floor over his quivering legs, warming them for a split klik, and Prowl simply gazed up at his partner, ravaged functions already fading and hissing in agony. His conscious blue light dwindled as something hard-edged and binary disintegrated inside of him (outside of him, dark hard secret innards exposed to chemical-stripping air).

"Forty-seven cycles and thirteen nanokliks," Prowl gasped before plummeting into emergency stasis.

That was how long his systems had been dripping into each other, mashed together by nothing but a makeshift brace, coolant searing and deadening connective wires… so that Lockdown could assess the damage and save his life.

Rational to the last moment.

"Prowl? Kid—"

His pretty partner crashed to the side, nothing but a bleeding doll with a blank visor.

"Damnit, Prowl!"

* * *

It didn't matter how he got back to the ship.

Lockdown carried Prowl all the way, keeping his cold partner crammed tightly against his chest-plating where the lifeless drip of pungent fluids forged sticky streaks down his scalding chassis. The kid was smeared with energon from top to bottom, not to mention that nasty hole in his head. Didn't know how he didn't recognize the danger at first, or the unaligned seam of the injury, but that crude patch job with the rope had fooled him—

Damn him. If he trusted the kid in one sense, Lockdown trusted him to keep himself alive--and now look where that got him.

Once inside Moot (she would start malfunctioning on him, he knew it, with her precious youngling mangled and so cold) Lockdown sprinted to his dark shop, hastily slamming and jabbing one of his extraction tables to the proper angle with his knees and any other available non-Prowl-filled limb. Moving as slowly (but as quickly) as possible, he gingerly settled Prowl into it, making sure his halved chassis was parallel with the floor.

No amount of care could have stopped the fresh slop of alarmingly cool liquids that came with the plane rearrangement. Lockdown winced as something inside Prowl _gurgled_, then crammed a wet servo to his face, backing away from the motionless mech, pistons ramming away inside of him. They were leagues away from any sort of medical attention, and further still from any medical attention he'd trust his partner to. And time—he didn't want to think about time.

"_Who can we go to?"_

Prowl had said it so long ago, during that nanovirus episode, like he didn't understand just how closed off they were from the well-mannered parade of society and the luxuries of unquestioned medical help. But the kid was like him, now. No one to fall back on except for Lockdown himself. Except for… the one he'd gone to for the virus, who may have been billions of lightyears away at that very moment but had everything in his poisoned little processor needed for fixing any variety of fatal wounds—and would still answer a call from an old 'friend'.

Tipper.

He bolted to the bridge, gunning Moot's engines (she replied rapidly, straining upward because she _knew_) until they were past the cloud-clotted atmosphere of the planet and into the void of 'hot' space. Hot as in it would carry a communicator signal clean to Alpha Centauri seven, even if he didn't know how far away the damned Medibot was hiding.

"Tipper," he snarled once he'd gotten the proper screens up. Moot had made the connection with pristine speed, but nothing but static filled the screen after the hailing note ended. Fake static: Lockdown knew the jumpy, grainy image it too well to suppose otherwise. Cloaking sham.

"Damnit, Tipper, don't you duck me. It's Lockdown."

Whether through the venom in his vocals or the fact that Tipper usually had nothing to fear (or money to gain) from the hot-tempered mech, the screen cleared, revealing the awkwardly scrawny Medibot, his green optics whirring and adjusting dully behind their ridiculously thick lenses. Tipper opened his hinged mouth to speak, but the bounty hunter raised a servo.

"You got schematics for the inside of a mech?"

The exiled Medibot blinked, the simple motion exaggerated to ponderous flapping proportions his magnifiers.

"That's a hugely vague request, guy. Wanting to do a few adjustments on yourself?" Tipper began, then smiled blandly. "Y'know, if you just come over here, for a few k credits you can have a trusted mechanical professional—"

"Cut the scrap, Tipper: give me the damn schematics."

"Well, yes, but—I mean, your model is hardly standar—" Tipper stuttered.

"It's not for me. It's the kid," Lockdown growled, red optics smoldering up at the screen. "Got lanced straight through the chassis. He's in full emergency stasis-lock and his stats are dropping fast. I need whatever you got or he goes offline."

The huge mech wasn't resorting to threats, but in that airless moment there was something infinitely more dangerous about Lockdown than the other mech had ever witnessed. It was a grinding, glaring something that said, in the grimmest tone possible, that he would commit murder if this went wrong—and 'this', from the sound of the injuries sustained, was more than 83.7 likely to go wrong. Tipper was silenced by the barbed desperation in thick-plated Lockdown's voice and the hunch of his spiked back, but startled back to life in the next moment, grasping for his next course of action. The orange-plated medibot reached for something at the base of the screen, fumbling a formidable blue cable out and messing with the corresponding port behind his bulbous auditory unit.

"Y-you'll have to hook him up to an energon drip, and possibly an artificial ventilator of some kind just to keep some air moving. And make sure to have a set of jumper cables nearby. Keep monitoring his electropulse: if that drops below 300 herz, you're fragged," Tipper rattled off nervously, stealing glances at the stony-faced mech as he connected via the cable. "I'll… I'll cable-upload the full blueprints for a mech of his make, alongside what I know about reconstruction, but—I'm tellin' you right now, Lockdown, this is gonna cost—"

"Shut up. Beam 'em over," Lockdown snapped, popping the mirroring input cable out of the sunken panel of Moot's control station and flipping open his port. He thumbed the cable into the base of his neck, checking all of the connections and the strength of the signal itself. Once both mechs were properly synced with their ships' convoluted innards, the connection kicked in with a piercing tone, siphoning a clean flow of encoded information from subspace into Lockdown's databanks. The instant the download ceased, he ripped the cable out (ignoring the pained flinch of his systems as he didn't give them time to disengage) and integrated the data as fast as he could, all too conscious of the hushed silence of the ship. Tipper fretted and picked at things with his slender digits as the bounty hunter glared at the wall with glowing green coding sweeping behind his optics, finally blurting:

"Lockdown, what in the Well are you going to use to—"

"You know me, Tip. I always got a few spares in the back," he growled, terminating the connection with a flick of his servo and stomping off to the deafeningly quiet shop that held his dying partner.

* * *

Laboring in the unforgiving white light of his shop, Lockdown quickly learned the difference between 'repair' and 'component transplant'.

Back at Blend's base, he had split-klik-groped around for any unseated fiddly bolts or vital pins in the tepid, gory pool of oil and coolant and energon before scooping Prowl into his arms and running like Pit, but to no avail. Everything was in him—though in which half, Lockdown wasn't sure. As the kid was, he was unsalvageable. His carburetor was jacked, his ventilation and temperature mechanics sliced in half alongside a host of other indirectly-fragged things Lockdown had yet to uncover, all still lurking in the wet basin of his chassis—or formerly wet. He'd drained the majority of the stuff to keep it from ruining Prowl's intact mechanisms, but he never would have guessed such a little bot could hold so much fluid or so many busted parts.

Luckily, he was Lockdown. Extra parts were his forte and he wasn't entirely unprepared for such a disaster. He was an expert at connective circuitry and knew a thing or two about the churn of a mech's systems: he had not a few specialized (bootleg) stat-scanning programs in his harddrive. He had also done small-scale operations on himself (such as the painful and meticulous replacement of fuel lines or energon-tubing) and while it was slightly easier to operate on someone else at a ninety-degree vantage point instead of the agonizing angle at which he picked and poked at himself, the other factors pretty much killed any ease he might have felt while craning over the ninjabot's lifeless form.

It was beyond difficult to even know where to start. Everything: messy, wet, sparking and fragged. Crunched carnage. Kid's chassis was a practical train-wreck, but he still bore down on it with everything he had—quite literally.

Prowl may not have approved of the pricy, exotic foreign tech Lockdown was tucking and soldering and syncing into his devastated insides, but Prowl didn't exactly have a say at that moment. He was rather… yes, dying. He needed a carburetor and he needed a coolant pump and the equivalent of a fan power-source, and he was getting them, even if they were forged from a crystal-metal found only in Bebello mines. It was the best Lockdown had and it was all he had; death was not an option.

Lockdown cursed viciously as solder dripped on a freshly-replaced fuel line, poking a sharp little hole in it. He grabbed the quick-fix putty and dabbed it in over the welling oil, then slammed the tube down on his work table and whirled to punch the other extraction table, roaring to the red-rimmed ceiling of his ship. Prowl's stats were dropping and the work was slow. Three megacycles in, and Lockdown was quietly aghast (clamorously outraged, physically explosive) at how little he'd accomplished when every cycle dragged at the kid's fluttering systems, weighing them into cold non-operation--

"Damnit, kid—"

He had his new-won blueprints set on instant-recall, sitting in his processor as a ghost image on his visual field. They made sense one minute, then crumpled up into a spiderweb of white lines, too complex for sanity's sake. Maybe it was the abrupt termination of the transfer-connection (or the dumb clench of his Spark for seven megacycles and counting) but he had never had so much trouble interpreting hard data before.

He checked the display screen. 500 herz.

Stung by the sluggish beep of the monitor, Lockdown moved the jumper cables closer, knowing to expose Prowl's un-insulated systems to such a harsh jolt might fry them, but it was the only option if his electropulse dropped below 300. Had to keep his core activated and keep him online—he'd deal with irreparable trauma later. The bounty hunter wiped his willowy blue servos off (the most dexterous mod-set he owned, adorned with seven digits each) and glanced at his partner's long blank face as he set to work preparing a glossy, alien-looking component for its life in Prowl's chassis.

"You stay with me. Don't make me spend all that slaggin' money you've got holed up," he snarled quietly to the supine mech, rubbing furiously at the spare part. "I'll buy kitsch just to spite you."

Every so often, when the alien parts refused to sync after eons of hard-wiring and encoded coaxing and he felt _something_ hiccup inside the smaller mech, he put a servo to the kid's pitifully exposed chamber. Just to check. For several unrelated reasons, he hated the way the singing little snowball of energy jumped when he touched it, so he brushed at it only to make sure Prowl was really still online. Jabbed at it to keep it pulsing. Agitate, inflame.

It came to the point where time—megacycles, endless megacycles under hard white light with makeshift tools and the maddening drip of oil off the table and no sanitation--didn't matter anymore. His dense, stiff existence was limited to groping for tools and maintaining an all-consuming, scalding level of concentration; to clawing along the increasing slope of system complexity and up his vicious learning curve, and freezing down to his last circuit when Prowl's electropulse just… paused, then beeped.

Then beeped.

Then beeped.

Did that sometimes. Irregular.

"We still got a contract," he muttered Primus-knew-how-many times, abusing his oversensitive, toil-numb digits with another painstaking adjustment, not daring to glare at the vacant visor or the placid, upturned face. "We still got a contract, and that don't include dyin' on me. That's called welshin': you don't welsh on me, damnit."

He didn't know how he managed it.

There were so many other factors—chemical imbalances, fluid-damage, basic system stress—that might have sent the kid's body crashing hard enough to douse Prowl's fluttering Spark. Ego had no place here. His only guess was that Prowl really, really wanted to survive and after twenty-six megacycles of detail-intensive, scraping labor, the kid was alive. Online and stabilized down to his internal pressure, black front sealed up with the sweeping hiss of a blowtorch. The now-steady beep of his electropulse finally let the fluid-spattered, hazy bounty hunter sink into hard stasis on the extra extraction table, cracked and dry systems setting to self-repair in the dark… settled every so often by a cool green beep.

Life. Supple, tangible, freshly repaired life.

Lockdown woke up needing a case of coolant like no other, but the fact that he woke up to a warm body was the nicest and only thing he could've asked for. The first breathless time he jumpstarted Prowl, the ninjabot tensed up and arched with a thick gasp, not knowing where he was, still dying in his processor… then his head hit the table and the red ceiling made sense. The battered young mech looked over and saw his partner standing at his side, one strange blue servo pressed to his chest-plating; a sweet, numb emotion deeper than relief rippled through him. Prowl's mouth twitched as his fingers slid over Lockdown's wrist, visor lit only sleepily, and he slipped, without a single question, into warm, crack-knitting recharge.

Lockdown waited until he was out of it before grinning back (lopsided and stress-charred though it was) and half-limping to the back of his shop to swap back to his normal, non-fiddly servos and dig out a galleon of oil and twice that of coolant. He'd done his part: the kid's body could do the rest. There were some things better left to nature, even if the ride wasn't exactly over yet.

When the kid woke up for real, he might not exactly forgive Lockdown for saving his life.

* * *

After overcoming the basic shock of being online, the kid had to deal with the nastier, EMP-impervious side of transplants. Every alternate-construction indulger knew the full system roil and wretch that followed an operation, heightening and tightening as coding failed to translate and convert and formatting interferences popped up everywhere like suffocating techno-mechanical cramps. Cybertronian guts were smart, however, and they would adjust and adapt to the incursion… even if that fact didn't spare Prowl from the dripping, debilitating nausea and bitter little glitches his struggling systems sent his way. The usually elegant ninjabot spent most of the first two endless space days curled into a ball in the dark, making muffled, pained little noises so helpless and miserable that Lockdown actually felt sorry for the kid.

Beyond that was the repulsive, unnatural curvature of the main invading entity, sitting in Prowl's scarred gut like a too-light, throbbing goose-egg. It always knocked a mech out a bit, to have a part of himself replaced. Took a while to settle around that part and have it settle in turn. Lockdown knew.

There was always a chance that Prowl's virgin uniform Autobot substructure wouldn't assimilate the foreign tech Lockdown had stuffed into him, but Prowl was young. Prowl was strong. Statistics gave him a 98.3 chance of survival. None of that stopped Lockdown from grabbing the kid's wrist, however, when Prowl made to slink off (silent, unwieldy, stunned) to his room for Primus-knew-what and giving him the hardest glare he could manage while still honestly checking him over.

"No way. You're with me."

Prowl didn't realize what he meant until Lockdown led him into his own recharge room and pointed to the berth. The bounty hunter didn't like Prowl's cramped quarters for various reasons and besides, there was no way _he_ was being delegated to the floor for this good deed—he was no goddamned martyr. Prowl would recharge no more than three feet from him until Lockdown could be certain that the battered little 'bot could go a night without crashing, and as he was restricted to stationary activities due to his unstable state, he'd be spending a Pit of a lot of time horizontal.

Lockdown knew there was a bawdy joke to make but didn't make it. He just kept pointing until Prowl sighed in a shadow of his old well-adjusted self and gingerly hoisted himself onto the older mech's berth, curling up just as carefully. The 'bot actually could take direction, and could also pack himself up tight enough to fill a spare square meter when on a stranger's berth. Lockdown instantly didn't take to being thought of as a stranger, but he had to admit a little pragmatic discomfort when settling down to recharge next to his partner the first night.

As unnervingly domestic some facets of their life were, the two never, ever recharged together; only drowsed after a particularly good and exhausting 'face, and even then Prowl ran out on his partner after no more than fifteen cycles of the lazy silence. The implications of this nocturnal cohabitation were out the tailpipe, and Lockdown hated sticky, bloated implications with a passion, but it was all for a function. He'd made a 26-hour, Primus-knew-how-expensive commitment, and he wasn't about to let Prowl fry a mere hallway away just because he didn't want the ninjabot aspirating down his back in the dark. All the same, he didn't shut down as quickly as he usually did with warm, watchful, nervous little Prowl laying behind him, crammed flat against the wall with six inches of space between them.

After the first few nights, so long as both solidly ignored what they were doing and neither was forced to 'climb onto the berth' with the other (they did it at relatively-casually the exact same moment, a precise preventative ritual without visual contact; no jokes, no excuses), it got easier. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, Lockdown couldn't say, but at least Prowl was stable… and _he_ was recharging without interruption.

* * *

A bare solar-cycle later, Lockdown was pestered out of a semi-aware recharge state by a maddening shuddering and clanking. Rousing himself from the syrupy middle-ground of partial stasis (that he limited himself to for just this reason: if anything went wrong with Prowl, he had to know immediately), he booted up his optics and looked over: Prowl was passed out on side, his golden back to the bounty hunter, shivering and shaking like an unsecured fan pin. Lockdown groaned in girder-deep exhaustion, laboriously propping himself up on an elbow and shoving at the smaller mech until Prowl booted up with a hidden electronic chirping sound.

"What's wrong with you?" He rasped, less harshly than the words implied. Prowl looked at him blearily, as though he was having a hard time synthesizing all the noises and impulses and visuals in that sudden moment (kid was slow to stir, what with his technological components still speaking different languages), and shook his head.

"Nothing," he said softly, blank vocals not meshing with the convulsive shudder of his limbs. "I feel fine."

Lockdown glared at him without an ounce of anger, then flicked his partner's shoulder decisively.

"Roll over."

Prowl obeyed, twisting until he was on his back. Lockdown growled and rolled his optics as soon as the ridge of Prowl's patched front came into the red backup lights, glimmering with dry dimpled ice. Still shuddering, the ninjabot ran a curious digit or two over the slick white shell while Lockdown plunked himself off of his berth and stretched like a black lion.

"Primus," he swore thickly, rubbing at his facial plating. "Pop your hood."

Cybertronians couldn't feel cold in the traditional sense. They could technically sense fluctuations in temperature as hard statistics and they found overheating vastly uncomfortable (and lethal to the more delicate mechanics), but cold was a negotiable term. Otherwise, the sterile temperatures of their Cybertronian atmosphere-less space environment would have driven them elsewhere long ago: the content of Moot's cabin, as it was, was nothing but recycled space air.

Extremely cold temperatures, on the other hand, could have an inhibitory effect on their heat-propelled inner workings, and normally, an above-freezing internal temperature had to be maintained or else dihydrogen-oxide or nitrogen would condense and ice over their plating, restricting basic movement, advanced dexterity and, if left unattended, survival. Cybertronians had a well-programmed defense for such an occurrence: a vibrating jerk and rattle of their flexors, which prevented any ice from covering their more vital joints--that same charming little programmed reflex that had woken Lockdown up.

After Prowl (with a brittle crack) followed Lockdown's directions, freed ice bouncing off his chassis, Lockdown ordered the lights on and handled his groggy partner to rights until he could inspect the problem. It presented itself quickly enough: Lockdown made an annoyed noise and Prowl bit back an uncomfortable groan as his physical stimuli field (which had knitted over the new 'organs' as best it could, even if they didn't speak Autobot code yet) wiggled and wavered and gagged at the deft press of Lockdown's servos on his insides.

"Forgot these suckers' default settings are Opums—damn Bebello units. Gotta recalibrate it into U-Stan before you ice over."

U-Stan stood for Universal Standard, the mathematical business language crafted of the most accepted measurement standards. Visor turned toward the ceiling, Prowl's haggard face smoothed the smallest bit at the brusque, unpretentious intelligence of his partner and his sure grip, but the physical discomfort of the situation did not go unpunished.

"I'm impressed. Your technical jargon makes you sound almost… clever," he murmured dryly, gritting his teeth against another surge of nausea. While it was not the most sporting thing to say when the other mech was elbow-deep in his vitals, Lockdown surprisingly didn't take offense.

"You think I got where I am by bein' an idiot, ninjabot?" Lockdown growled lightly; the honest question quieted his partner until Lockdown metaphorically wiped his hands, sent something thumping away inside of him and snapped his hood back down. Prowl shuddered down to his pedes as his internal temp began to climb in (well-converted) earnest, but by the time the ice was nothing but beads of liquid on his chest-plating, his thoughts had sunk to what lay beneath that plating, throbbing and gulping away.

He had not had much time to process the staggering changes that had crashed over him with all the distractions involved in surviving. A spare three solar-cycles ago, he had nearly died. Lockdown had replaced a little over a fourth of his mechanics with whatever he had on hand—and what was the definition of a Cybertronian but what they were constructed of? Prowl realized all over again, with the freed liquid dribbling down his chassis, that those pieces were from an entirely alien world; that he didn't know what the Pit was inside of him, and those contraptions were supposed to keep him alive.

Lockdown, watching as Prowl moodily touched a servo to his front (he'd been mindlessly groping himself and minding his chassis like a protoform ever since the operation), grunted and gave his should-be-grateful partner a grumpy, demanding look. Prowl glanced up, then looked away.

"It's as though I… cannot trust my very mechanics," he murmured after a moment of mournful silence. Lockdown arched his white brow. He could have railed about how horribly expensive the pieces were, or how if they were good enough for him they were good enough for Prowl, or how _ungrateful_ the melancholy little punk was acting, but he simply took a seat next to the smaller mech, venting a short puff of air.

"Didja know your insides before? Personally?" He asked gruffly. Prowl's visor thinned yet further as a small, considering sound drifted out of him.

"Not… exactly," he admitted, vocals still delicately sad. He may have been crafted with them, but he didn't take the effort to know them—they were simply part of him, _parts_ of him. They made him who he was, and now…

"Learn to know these," Lockdown told him, tapping a knuckle on his partner's chassis with a nearly affectionate smirk. "They're a part of you now, like it or not. They do their job… if you remember to swap unit differences."

Prowl didn't—refused to—wind down, even with his well-phrased finality-saturated statements. Kid just sat with his knees together, moping silently. More exhausted than annoyed (recharging at half-efficiency had left him more sluggish than he'd expected), Lockdown made an aggravated noise and ordered the lights off, hauling himself onto his formidable truck-bed berth.

"You're a ninjabot. You metaphysical type like that 'know yourself down to your functioning units' thing," he grumbled over his shoulder with as little condescension as he could resist. He shuffled, twisting onto his side. "Consider this a class in knowin' yourself… just with a few foreign speakers."

Prowl looked over at him—or the spiky, dangerous-looking lump in his place—with a well-contained ethereal surprise. Seldom did his practical partner deal in metaphors, and more seldom still for his sake. Turned away from Prowl's delicately widened visor, heavy, dark Lockdown waved a servo drowsily.

"You'll survive. Now shut up and shut down before I knock you out. I'm runnin' on empty: if you want me to boot up at all next time you malfunction, kid, you'll settle."

Lockdown fell back with a haggard but satisfied sound, clanking as he settled himself flat on the berth. Prowl stayed perched on the side for a moment longer, then attempted, with a demure and hopeless air, to scoot up and tuck himself in between Lockdown and the wall for much-needed recharge. Try as he would to be _comfortable_, however, it just wasn't possible to curl up or stretch out without touching the other (aggravated) mech overly much. Prowl continued in this indirect, discreet series of shiftings and wincings for at least five cycles, all while his partner—despite the concrete, aspiration-less silence of his horizontal form—became more and more irritated with each hesitant squirm. Within kliks Lockdown was utterly sick of his vacillations: he _hated_ people who didn't know what they wanted, whether it was a business agreement or as petty as their very words or motions or fretting about how they should lay down when it was _obvious_ that he didn't want the little punk spooning him like a drooling organic but he still needed to _recharge_ sometime that night--

"Would'ja _quit_—!"

Rolling over in a huge mess of scrapes and metal-on-metal screeches, Lockdown's huge paw of a servo came down and snagged Prowl by the side, jostling him until he was wedged against the bounty hunter, chassis-to-chassis. Lockdown glared down at his partner, patted him in a forcible way then turned over, venting a bit of hot air.

"I said _settle_. Wearin' on my circuits," he groused vaguely, engine revving half-heartedly. In the next second, with Prowl motionless at his back, the older mech was solidly shut down, much-needed darkness overtaking his still-dry, still-frayed mechanics. He would need a few more solar-cycles before regaining optimum efficiency. After the room was sleeping-silent, Prowl leaned into the warm body and smiled slightly. This was… acceptable: not just by his own standards but by Lockdown's biased, ever-shifting rules, which always deserved wariness.

Falling into recharge next to someone was something tenderly new to the quiet ninjabot, stoking his Spark to sparkling pulsations. Prowl had his own reasons for not wishing to recharge or dally too long with his partner, and most of them (the unspoken, cutting variety) orbited around the chance of being rejected if oft-cold, pointedly objective Lockdown realized how much he enjoyed it. No, it was better to stay away… or it had been, until Lockdown saved his life and dragged him close. This… development deserved a spontaneous act or two—and if Prowl had learned nothing from his roguish, unpredictably-selfless partner, it was that pushing the rules every so often was expected if not necessary for learning.

The next time he entered the bounty hunter's dark room, Prowl decisively mounted the berth and curled against Lockdown's hulking back, one servo resting unobtrusively on the larger mech's wheel-studded hip. A tense bit of silence faded away just as quickly as it came, and both set about their business of recharging. He'd committed to being forward about it and because of that, Lockdown let the hand stay.

That, and it felt kinda nice.


	16. Personal Defeat

A/N: This totally evolved into a painful chapter D: It started out as… kinda wangsty but quick-fix, and then Prowl had to get all emotionally PROACTIVE on my poor fangirl ass. He doesn't want emotional conflicts, he wants emotional resolution, affirmation and preventative measures! He's too smart to take this shit twice. Lockdown, why you got'sa mess everythin' up?

Ugh. Communication barriers are so annoying, but the fluff is well-worth it. (Yes, fluff. Fluff with _spiny armor_.) And, uh, please review! Pretty please?

…Preez? (squirm) I'm very punctual!

-.-.-.-

Personal Defeat

-.-.-.-

The problem began in the next two months.

After two weeks of lopsided domestic near-bliss spent curled next to his warm partner at night, Lockdown's door was locked. After it failed to ease open at his approach, Prowl stared at the cold barrier, more surprised than he should have been. Stretching what he knew of the other mech—nothing was ever accidental, but Prowl couldn't help but hope, enamored with the lure of his new tangible, slightly noisy nights—he knocked. Lockdown opened up after a few kliks, stared at him and asked him what he wanted.

Prowl couldn't quite say. He shook his head, stammered some lukewarm apology and padded back to his empty quarters. And that was that.

He was operational. Tipper had run a full diagnostic scan on him (Prowl fidgeted under the greasy stroke of the green scan-bar as the ugly mech eyed him appreciatively from three thousand light-years away) and it appeared Lockdown had done himself justice: save for a few adjustments that were made on the spot, Prowl was fully patched, fully functional, properly synced and was henceforth allowed to indulge in varying rehabilitative exercises meant to progressively test (and stress) his systems. As this did not include risking death on the job, the two were condemned to unemployment until both could be certain Prowl wouldn't throw a rod in the middle of a mission.

He conducted his retraining in the bridge, faced with a red-lacquered wall of stars. Tai-chi went wonderfully. His metallikato exercises came off without a hitch and his new temperature-control 'organ' was so supremely sensitive that he never even felt a blush of muggy exertion heat. Prowl was operational in every sense of the word, but with his rehabilitation came a stunning and lamentable shift in his world: slowly and surely, Lockdown began to draw away.

He began, of course, with false expectations. The nights had tricked him. It was nothing more than an exercise in functionality, keeping him close like that, but Prowl became attached quickly: he… liked it and was duped into feeling all the closer to his partner for that pretty circumstance, especially after what the bounty hunter had _done_ for him. Lockdown had saved his life against all odds. It just seemed like a symphonic culmination of sorts to be ushered into Lockdown's private space; a fitting embrace, to progress to closeness after such a symbolic gesture. It was too heavy to think about, too much of a boon. At first, Prowl could only stare and echo and realize that he was alive—_alive_-- because of one reason and one reason only: Lockdown's strange kindness.

But it had cost an ungodly amount to keep him online.

While the healing ninjabot didn't expect a congratulatory party for surviving, any kind of small satisfaction or contentedness at his restored state was notably absent after the first three weeks, replaced by a brusque and ever-stiffening lack of interaction from his huge, glaring partner. In saving his life, Lockdown had sacrificed the most important component of his own life: money. Prowl looked up the parts Lockdown gave to him and nearly gasped at the expected prices. It was devastating--in the six-digit area--and that was without considering the massive fee Lockdown had paid for the blueprints and instructions from merry extortionist Tipper.

Lockdown had done it all without being asked and without asking for compensation, so the ninjabot couldn't help but feel a surge of guilt at his partner's grim silence and his own costly existence. He even accepted the other's anti-social leanings at first, just because he could say nothing against Lockdown with the bumpy welding scar looping his chassis (but even burdened as he was, Prowl stood helpless and wanting as the special night-time something disintegrated, pointedly retreating back into the circumstantial darkness whence it came).

It began as an aching return to status quo as Prowl was forced to return to his own room that night, but the situation darkened further. The older mech didn't seek him out anymore and hadn't taken a job for weeks (months?), instead spending an obsessive amount of time shut in his shop, working with his mods. While Lockdown could be forcibly solitary for weeks at a time when they were en route, it was too much of a blow with the recent trauma: this distance was not casual, but chilly and uncomfortable. Ever-gauche Lockdown didn't speak to him unless absolutely necessary, leaving Prowl to guess and press at the terrifying silence. Eventually, the ninjabot was driven to a cold, hateful conclusion forged by brittle weeks of agonizing close-quartered evasion--and in truth, Prowl had expected better of the mech he called a partner.

If Lockdown wanted him to leave, he should have said so instead of leaving it to weak silent cues.

It was obvious. What was done was already done, but Lockdown regretted saving his life at such a cost. Apparently his investment—the time spent, the mechanical parts—was not worth it. Prowl himself, cognitive and functioning and back at his side, was not worth it, and the practical mech was making a point to withdraw after such an impulsive and deleterious decision—only worsened by the sad slip of allowing gullible Prowl into his room.

Gone was the banter, the casual interaction, most of all any amount of their sly, scalding attraction: stuck-up Prowl would have given much to see Lockdown's optics flash in that barbaric, hot-Sparked way, or show anything besides vaguely displeased apathy, but apparently the gross cost of his existence was too repulsive to allow intimacy, even for one as interface-addicted as Lockdown. Too repulsive to allow an explanation, even, but why bother? It was inevitable.

The eternally practical businessman was preparing, after eight rich decades of smirking and killing and kissing and two weeks of sweet accidents, to cut his losses and run.

-.-.-.-

It wasn't so callous or so convoluted, really, but Lockdown was too wrapped up in his own grinding thought-processes to bother with Prowl's. In truth, the shift had started weeks beforehand, when Prowl (quietly bold Prowl) took to stroking Lockdown's warm flanks before slipping into recharge. He was sure, for a ritual-inclined ninjabot, that it was a soothing, absent gesture, but not only did Lockdown find it odd to be used as a (spiny, red-optic'ed) comfort item, it also turned him on the slightest bit.

Which got him thinking.

Interfacing, when dealt with in technical terms, was a suffocating, insanely pleasurable series of system-stresses which culminated in an energy overload and jarring loss of power. With Prowl's recent replacements, even alongside Tipper's professional assurances, Lockdown didn't like the sound of sending Primus-knew how many volts of Spark energy ripping through the kid's substructure and forcing every frayed system into violent shut-down. Things could hitch; things could fry. Maybe it was just his toothy craftsman's pride, or the fact that he didn't want to reboot to Prowl's flat-lining electropulse after ten cycles of system failure, but Lockdown didn't like the odds of having horizontal electro-fun at that point in time. Prowl was too… (and he hated this word, vulnerability none too endearing) delicate.

But of course, he couldn't say so; wouldn't dream of it. That would be too… everything, but if there was the slightest chance that his newly coy partner could jump him and demand to be overloaded into oblivion (yeah, right), he was out of there without a single word of explanation. Which, in his slightly-paranoid state, was more often than not—and who was he to explain things? He didn't _explain_, he _did._ Better safe than sorry: if he was playing it that way, he might as well play it _all_ the way, and that involved a Pit of a lot of time in his shop, where the buzz of his chainsaw generally drowned out the senselessness of what he was doing.

He was _hiding_, for Spark's sake. From the _kid_.

It wasn't even that he was holding back. He wasn't. Lockdown _never_ held back: he never put his own desires aside to benefit someone else. Selfish, his middle name and religion. It was simply that he didn't… want to, if it could damage Prowl. It utterly turned him off the concept: there was too much stress associated with it, even though he could've killed for a good overload at that point, if just to sap the ugly, tense energy from his substructure after so many weeks of uncertainty.

This nasty little emotional paradox was the most painful, confounding thing he'd stubbed his digits on in stellar-cycles. Prowl absolutely couldn't recharge with him anymore, that was certain and expected from the beginning, but this? This was fragging ridiculous.

It was defeat when he altered his urges to accommodate someone else. It was a personal defeat and an _invasion_ when his urges altered themselves and left him no choice. Even past the grueling, scorching megacycles he'd spent crouched over the kid, Lockdown hadn't allowed the trauma of what _might_ have happened to sink in: he kept that cold, lonely empty-ship death on the edges of his processor, and tried to focus on _not_ focusing on Prowl, who was unwittingly forcing him into untold internal acrobatics by simply _existing_.

No, the pretty little ninjabot had wormed inside of him unconditionally and he was furious at that fact, ill at ease with his own moping lack of enthusiasm for sex, of all things. It wasn't natural or normal, and its gaping absence made for some odd questions: sex was the one thing Prowl honestly expected from him, whether disparagingly or neutrally or with a quick smile. That looming fact made Lockdown avoid Prowl more, pushing the dance on for almost-nervous weeks, because he (cramped, confused, cornered) didn't want to admit the change to _himself_ by openly refusing a 'face… and for the stupidest of paranoid reasons.

Unfortunately, after two months of functional denial, intimacy came to him bearing a simple request: to stop the shadow games or end it all.

-.-.-.-

Music was worthless when he was constructing, so the cavernous, mod-lined room echoed with nothing but the hissing, grinding sounds of his work. It was one of his endless shop-days, where he'd retreated to the scuffed-up floor to save his struts the vertical-tension worry. He liked Prowl's soothing Circuit-su ministrations a bit too much nowadays, but coming to his partner for that would have been a violation of his casual-avoidance streak (and a horribly open invitation to seduce him, which Lockdown _hated_ the fact that he couldn't want), so he smarted from fiddly, prickly things that needed tending.

When the door opened, he didn't hear it for the close hiss of his welding tool gliding along the grappler-mod he was customizing, so Prowl's gold-striped pedes were the first thing he saw. Lockdown looked up, auditory units stinging from the noise of his work, not quite registering the dark, compact presence of his partner in front of him, visor thin and bright. He only drew back at the ominous violation of his imaginary space, white face twisting with trained displeasure, but by then (beautiful, efficient) Prowl was already on top of him.

He didn't quite knock the grappler out of Lockdown's grip, but expertly twisted his wrist until his flexors disengaged and the related digits sprang apart. It clattered away, and his other blow-torching hand clanged down for support as Prowl's weight pushed him back; the slick little model sank to his knees, both legs scraping Lockdown's wheel-adorned hips as he simply bore forward, pushing down, pushing back. Considering his partner sufficiently disarmed, Prowl slipped into his hard lap, cornering him with the vise of his thighs. A nervous but darkly determined tremor propelled his body and its seductive maneuvers, both servos cupping Lockdown's thorny neck as his warm mouth grazed the other's strong white jaw.

It was beyond unnatural, every movement sharpened by Prowl's mounting anxiety: he had never been forced to do this. Normally, the lecherous mech came around looking for it with an easy grin and Prowl simply fell into him, but now the ninjabot stabbed onward and downward with a hard hand. Lockdown recoiled, unnerved by the close kissing cling of his normally distant partner and the simple fact that _this was bad—_he bucked up from the floor, straining away.

"Damnit-- kid, how many times do I gotta tell you, don't screw with me when I'm—"

Truth was, he'd never had to tell Prowl anything. Prowl had never done anything to bother him or invade his personal space in eighty-some stellar-cycles: the exclamation came out barbed and reflexive and slightly desperate, especially as the damned minx scraped his chassis across Lockdown's, kissing his dark throat. Hot and pinched on the floor, the bounty hunter was trapped: he couldn't physically toss Prowl off without an explanation, so he did the next best and worst thing.

Nothing.

It only took a few spare, horribly tense cycles of the scraping, earnest assault for Prowl to realize that Lockdown, ever-eager lecher Lockdown, wasn't responding to him in the slightest. He did not shift, did not move. The mech was splayed, ill at ease and chilly, under Prowl's laboring liquid form, and no hand came to cup his lower back; every twist of the ninjabot's hips and digits sought some flare of heat or affirmation that simply… wasn't there.

Lockdown didn't make an excuse, because that would have implied that there was an excuse to be made. He just waited for the kid to frag off, pistons working too fast for comfort. Prowl froze; the unreal silence wrapped them tighter to one another, both painfully aware of time and stillness and the heatless scrape of their bodies.

Finally, Prowl drew back, slow and stiff. His face slid from Lockdown's neck and with a few inches of space air in between them, the ninjabot suddenly seemed a thousand frosty miles away as he looked his partner in the face with a blankness so complete Lockdown felt something crash inside of him.

"I take it our contract has expired."

Lockdown's processor kicked back to life at the coldness in his partner's vocals.

"What?"

Prowl's hand dropped from his shoulder; he smoothed it over his front, expressionless and well-adjusted. Professional, as though he had just received the results from a test.

"If you will liquidate and withdraw my half of our earnings, you may drop me off at the nearest B-level planet," Prowl stated, extricating himself from Lockdown's lopsided lap without a glance at the larger mech. He rose from the entire hot, undignified, weird situation with a sterile, straight-backed grace that caused Lockdown, even before he registered what the punk was saying, to lunge forward and snatch at Prowl's wheel before he could walk away.

"_What_?" He demanded explosively, mouth hanging open before his teeth snapped shut in a half-grimace. "Wh--_hold_ it, kid. You're malfunctioning, what the Pit are you sayin'?"

Prowl, fully vertical, looked down at the larger mech with a pallid mixture of distance and contempt.

"I have obviously lost your interest, Lockdown, and proved too heavy an expense." Bitterness lurked below his smooth vocals, betrayed by the half-clench of his servos. His blank face burned with his restraint. "As objective as our business arrangements claim to be, this ship is too small for feigned relations. I will take my leave of you and our partnership."

Lockdown didn't mean to let go of the kid's wheel: he just did. Everything in him came undone, in a way, after he heard that, and his grip was no exception. He should have dug in and dragged him down, because Prowl turned and began to walk away with a sick air of finality. Lockdown snarled, clearing his cluttered tools away with a vicious swipe of his arm and heaving himself to his pedes, roaring:

"_Frag_—no! No—would'ja quit—" He gritted his teeth and stomped forward, thrashing for more words. "Quit bein' such a goddamn femme!"

Prowl stopped, stung by the insult. Lockdown could see his long face lock up, distant and snotty, just like when they were still brushing elbows far above Earth's scarred surface—but at least it _stopped_ him. But then there was the question of what to do once he was stopped.

He'd worked stupidly hard not to have to _say_ anything. No, he'd spent the last month of his life dedicated, processor and mechanics, to evasive silence—but the kid was ready to leave if he didn't say something. _Leave_, and after eighty goddamn stellar-cycles_._ It was unthinkable, but it was also right in front of him, so his processor crunched it (choking, choking) like the numbers it should have been. Lockdown sucked in a slow drag of air as Prowl waited with his fists clenched, one servo drifting up to press at his temple. Trying to come up with something that didn't sound like an excuse.

"I don't… it's not that I don't wanna. I do," he mumbled dumbly, deep vocals rendering the slurred consonants nearly unintelligible. His red optics flicked to the side, away from his glaring partner. "It's your repairs. Stuff like that's a stress on your system. I'm bein' smart about it."

Prowl turned to the larger mech, thin lip curling, because it was all unspoken, as it always was. Their communication barrier was still towering and thick as ever, and so Prowl struck the same vein, though the range of his hurt expanded above and beyond the simple fact of physical intimacy.

"It has been _months_," he said, dull and hateful. Lockdown glared at him.

"And it'll be a few more fraggin' months if I say so," the bounty hunter growled dangerously. Anger was an easy emotion: a motivation savior, giving him sharp words and blessed focus where he had none. He stepped toward his partner, pinning him with an accusatory digit. "The Pit's your hurry? You wanna shake yourself to pieces? If it's all the same to you, I'd rather not make the twenty-six fraggin' megacycles I spent piecin' you back together spit in the wind!"

It wasn't meant to be hurtful. It was a snarling measure of devotion and a dissection of what was at stake, but all Prowl heard was an accusation. His attempt to startle Lockdown into talking was just another wretched inconvenience; another inane acrobatic of the mistake. Wasted resources. Wasted effort. Prowl's visor dimmed, stung all over again. He took a moment to answer, because there was little to say with Lockdown glaring at him alongside a heavy, sickening clench of his Spark.

"I apologize. I am not accustomed to being treated as though I am… valuable," he rejoined softly, vocals ripe with a cruel humor.

It was certainly a change to be _considered_ instead of tossed aside or thrown down: he had become so familiar with Lockdown's brash physical negligence that concern was as foreign and alarming as an assault. The argument Lockdown was operating from, however, was pitiful and infuriating—Prowl knew he wouldn't hold back, he was too _thoughtless_—and it became all the more so when the bounty hunter actually had the nerve to laugh, short and rough.

"Pit, kid, I just poured a million and a half credits into you," he chuckled, looking at Prowl with a flash of his old sly self. "Right now you're worth five times your weight in crystallized high-grade energon: you and Moot are my top investments."

Sharp jokes weren't enough, after weeks of anxiety and self-doubt and the heady fear that he really was nothing to Lockdown. Jilted rage flared inside the battered ninjabot, nearly blinding him.

"Such a pity you received a bad return on the former," Prowl snarled. The burst of petulance still sounded remarkably chilly in his vocals, but Lockdown caught his arm before he could turn away again. Engine rumbling deep inside his chassis, he tugged Prowl around to face him, shutting up any new petty outbursts with a firm grip and his undivided red-lit attention.

"What you're not used to… is bein' treated like a slaggin' egg-shell protoform: soft-peddled and scrap," he began slowly, tattooed face uncommonly grim. "Most times, I knock you around 'cos I know you can take it. I knock you around and let you fend for yourself 'cos I know you're like me, and maybe you get off on it a little. Now's not one of those times."

The bounty hunter let go of him and averted his optics again; the freed servo drifted up to his neck, scuffing behind a spike as he came to the wounded crux of it all.

"I wasn't gonna touch you 'till I knew you could survive an overload," Lockdown muttered. "But I stayed busy just in case."

Lockdown was telling the truth. The uncertain grind of his vocals proved it. It was… so simple—agonizingly simple. How could something so simple have become so destructive, boiled to tangled heights by the airless crucible of their too-small ship?

Something crucial depressurized inside of Prowl with an unheard hiss when faced with Lockdown's bare honesty, but his distraught, bewildered expression rose from the crash of a thousand other noisy circumstances: namely, dodgy, impossible things with no logical explanation that had made his existence hell for the past two months. He stared at Lockdown, visor wide.

"That's all it was? A preventative measure for interfacing?" He nearly gasped. Affirmed by Lockdown's dark silence, Prowl looked down, blue visor bending in exhaustion, one servo to his forehead. When he spoke, it was a crushed deadpan. "If you had simply _told_ me—"

"Hey, this wasn't a problem 'till you made it one!" Lockdown snapped, back on the offensive.

"It was completely unnecessary," Prowl insisted, glaring at the bounty hunter as he crossed his wiry arms.

"It worked."

"And how long would it have continued? Until your fears were miraculously assuaged and we could resume our _schedule_?" Prowl retorted. Lockdown snorted but did not speak, eyeing the stiff ninjabot resentfully. Prowl faced him, gesturing sternly at the air with both servos. "Communication, Lockdown, is a necessity for what we do. You cannot simply make a decision and plow forward with it without informing me. I cannot agree to conditions I have not heard!"

Lockdown snorted again, more scathingly than before.

"You gonna gripe me out for keepin' my chamber on lock-- all for your sake?"

"When it implies that you would wish nothing more than for me to leave? Quite," Prowl responded frostily. The bounty hunter's optics widened and flashed, but Prowl stayed the coiled-up beast with a firm, unforgiving hand before Lockdown could protest or snarl.

"You saved my life at extreme cost, then hardly deigned to speak to me for forty solar-cycles," he said sharply, visor a calculating sliver of blue.

"I—I let you recharge on my berth!"

"All the more shocking when you barred me without a word of warning," Prowl countered, sparse expression both dark and appraising. "What would you have had me think?"

Off kilter, Lockdown growled and balked and snapped at an excuse that didn't seem to be forthcoming: almost as though the situation and the decision and the following actions were all too _normal_ to think up a reason for. There _was_ a reason and he'd told it, even if Prowl didn't exactly know it at the time—

"You weren't supposed to _think_ anything, you were supposed to just—"

Lockdown sputtered into jerking, gesticulating silence, nearly clawing at his face with the stress of coming up with words for the ever-demanding, ridiculous ninjabot.

"I believe rumination is one's only defense in such a forcibly ignorant situation, and I had much time to indulge," he returned stiffly. In the shifting silence, one servo drifted to his front again, palm scraping over the bumpy welding scar as he looked to the side, hesitating for a naked too-warm moment. "Logical as your intent was, the shift followed my surgical rescue too closely. Considering your behavior, I was… under the impression that you regretted doing so."

Lockdown stilled as though seeing Prowl for the first time, a focused, hard light in his optics.

"What?" He rumbled, truly serious. The bounty hunter straightened, moving over to Prowl with a nearly angry twist of shock on his pale face. "Just how scrambled are you? Is that what this is about: me savin' your circuitry?"

"It was very expensive," Prowl said softly, as though it should explain everything.

"Yeah, and I'm more'n prepared to take half the cost outta your account soon's I know you can handle the shock," Lockdown growled brusquely then leaned close to him, tapping intently at his patched head. "Listen, kid. Whatever line of sour coding's on loop in there, delete it, because I'll tell you somethin'. I knew what I was doing. I do whatever the Pit I want to and I don't regret anything."

The mech paused, nearly hesitating—nearly. He couldn't keep the tight discomfort out of his vocals, but he said it anyways.

"I value you. You know I do: if I didn't value you, you wouldn't be online right now."

Prowl looked up at him, mouth parting slightly—the only sign of the numb clench of his Spark and the split-second hitch of his pistons. Lockdown vented a small, gritty amount of air, pushing at Prowl's thick head again.

"I just wanna keep it that way, alright?" He muttered, arching his brow pointedly. "Which you would'a figured out, if you hadn't been so tangled in your own wires."

Prowl's long face relaxed, the last trace of raw anxiety chased from his sore substructure as Lockdown did nothing but stare at him for a moment more, neither smiling nor frowning: giving him stability by simple visual contact and three-dimensional acknowledgement. His wounded, crushing world expanded and let air—and his partner—in. His fears were unfounded and neutral space filled the yawning, stinging cavern they had eroded in him: he was… calm, blessed rough-vocal certainty filling all his cracks, but that didn't silence him.

This conversation, after all, had been eighty indirect, assumptive stellar-cycles in coming.

"You still… must consider me when making decisions," he murmured, hidden optics searching Lockdown for the expected surge of irritation. His partner only snorted again, taking a moment to pop his long, spike-studded neck.

"Yeah. I _consider_ you a suspicious little malfunction with an overactive extrapolative logic drive," Lockdown (barely) snarled, glaring at the younger mech. "I never said anything about you leaving. I didn't put you back together just for you to run out on me: if I wanted you out, I'd tell you!"

"Actions speak louder than words," Prowl persisted, sending ninjabot-wisdom-allergic Lockdown into an immediate, snarling full-body jerk, red optics lighting.

"Fer the love of—"

"And for a mech of so few and so misleading words, actions are your currency of communication. I can only trust what you do, partner: how am I to correctly interpret what you do without the barest of explanations? A simple debriefing would have saved us the trouble today, and I'm certain both of us can regret that."

Lockdown, immediately knocked down a notch, could only grumble at Prowl's unflinching assault, once more reduced to eyeing him mistrustfully until the persnickety (but aggravatingly logical) 'bot had his say. The ninjabot aspirated faintly, looking down at the floor for a moment before speaking.

"All I ask, Lockdown, is… to be considered beyond my basic necessities. I do the same for you."

"You considerin' that you're drivin' me to short-circuit with all this roundabout trash?" Lockdown sneered. Prowl shook his head, smiling slightly.

"For the sake of efficiency and accord, Lockdown: communication. Not implication," he said softly. "Please."

Suddenly, Lockdown was trapped. He had been trapped since Prowl had forced him to his feet with that cold threat, but with that single sentiment, he was stripped of reason to carry on in his cherished unexplained way. The way the punk said it, it sounded… rational. Logical. Being open worked for other people, or so he'd heard—the ones who didn't jack up and die, that is, but the kid was looking at him like he had all of his hopes pinned on one crusty sociopathic bounty hunter who wouldn't know emotionally healthy communication from a smoking hole in the ground. And, whether through intense stupidity or just-as-scary faith and affection, Prowl did.

That same bounty hunter needed to… consider.

But that implied other kinds of implications. That threatened ruminations, and a possible teeth-grinding acceptance of the three-dimensional nature of their situation. Their _unprofessional_ situation. The basic fact that Prowl could be _hurt_ by something he did—hurt, not functionally offended--opened up a whole new rash of depth to their… thing. It made him give ground; surrender a dearly held if mostly denial-bolstered tenet of his life. Charring, masterful objectivism.

Kid was stripping him plate by plate. A decade ago, he wouldn't have taken this. He _couldn't_ have taken this, but now? The threat was too large and an empty ship too drastic to consider. He could try being _sensitive_… if it would keep Prowl from packing his things.

"Fine. _Fine_," he snarled, then glared dirtily at his manipulative little partner, green-striped chassis puffing out a bit. "If you can take somethin' that crazy away from a good deed, I gotta spell everything out for you anyways. Fine."

"Fine," Prowl repeated after a ponderous moment, a little too lightly for comfort. A half-smile still nested easily on his pretty face as he watched Lockdown a little too closely, visor glowing a healthy, calm blue. Lockdown, still channeling the muggy steam of the defused situation, stormed away from their battleground and flopped down into his work chair, grimacing to the side.

"Mulish little crankshaft," the bounty hunter tossed at him after a slow, chair-squeaking moment, grousing under his breath. Prowl took that as his cue to leave: he nodded and walked away, deliriously satisfied with the progress if not the slightly numb warm spot in him—whether or not he could diagnose the feeling and cause upon returning to his room, he was unsure, but it filled the gouge left by his dark weeks, and that was enough. He was almost at the shop door, however, when his partner called him back; Prowl turned.

Lockdown, still slumped in his chair, was regarding him in a wary, haggard fashion, mod-working hand drumming its seven digits on his leg. Prowl waited. The bounty hunter shifted uncomfortably for a moment before speaking.

"You're staying," he grunted tensely.

Prowl didn't know what to do, at first. Then he smiled slowly, nodding, and Lockdown visibly—finally—relaxed, collapsing on a mechanical level: every spring and flexor sagged with a weary wheeze. It was hard to imagine a barricaded, desensitized soul so out of touch with another that he failed to noticed the earlier, placated shift in his partner. He had no idea what Prowl needed. He had no true grip of what the ninjabot was looking for in that terse and alarming exchange and only relaxed after receiving concrete proof that Prowl wouldn't run out on him that very moment.

Still, it showed something. Something, unless Prowl was mistaken, that was very, very important to both of them. In his own way, Lockdown would manage to keep Prowl… and that meant he would _try_. Honestly, truly try, and that was as much a victory as getting him to listen.

The ninjabot paused at the door a moment longer, then, rather than retreat to his room to mull over Lockdown's eventual (and trying) social reconditioning, wandered back to his crumpled partner, glad of a hazy excuse to not leave just yet. He stopped in front of Lockdown's chair; his partner onlined one optic then shut it off, far beyond the point of caring. Prowl put one servo to his chin, listening to the hairpin groans and clicks of the hulking mech's mechanics.

"You need adjusting," he observed mildly.

"Don't," the other mech grunted reflexively.

"I can hear it."

"S'not that bad."

Baffled, Prowl took a moment to realize that his stubborn, exhausted partner was still clinging to the chance that Prowl might seduce him—or he'd simply spent so long training himself in that mind-set that two months of concentrated aversion birthed an instant reaction, not even considering the dialogue of minutes before. Confidence slinking back into his once-dry crevices, greasing him into a beautiful gold-trimmed machine, Prowl smirked.

"Pardon my nerve, but I can safely say my tryst with seduction has left me satisfied," he ventured with his classic sardonic lilt, looking roguishly at Lockdown. "I swear upon my honor, your virtue shall remain untouched."

Lockdown, optics back online and blazing, probably made that certain beyond-mortified expression only once in his life, but it was definitely worth it. Prowl would have laughed out loud if he hadn't been so absorbed in his partner, even the sneering, snorting difficulty he was having in coming up with a retort. After a few cycles of internally refuting the idea of… _that_, Lockdown gave up and got up, stomping back to his room with many an ill-concealed (yet not explicitly negative) grumble; Prowl trailed after, looking affectionately at his partner's hulking back and oddly lanky, out-of-sorts frame.

-.-.-.-

It was unreal, climbing onto his berth after the nerve-wringing clash of just a half-megacycle before, but much like their nocturnal cohabitation, both adapted with silence and sure, skilled movements. Prowl easily slipped into the blessedly calm ritual of aligning another's vitals, own echoing body practically quailing under the rush of pure _stability_ after such a stressful expenditure; he needed the experience just as heavily as Lockdown.

It went smoothly, all bits slipping back into place, but right before Lockdown blanked out into stasis (as he always did—even when he managed to resist the hypnotic pull of Prowl's skills, he stumbled around and slurred so much that he ended up taking a recharge nap anyways), his huge heavy arm strained up and bumped against Prowl's golden back, sleepily weighing Prowl against his chest.

Prowl made a small sound of surprise as he was drawn down but did not pull away. Giving up his consciousness with a puff of warm air, the bounty hunter held him there as the last of his circuits emptied of hissing blue power, digits curling gently at the young mech's neck. It was a lopsided embrace; a simple want of touch and compulsive closeness, of relief and defused (if unspoken) fears, and Prowl melted under it, giving himself entirely to the hard planes of his partner's chest with an unheard sigh. He settled and softened, body humming earnestly in tandem with Lockdown's, eventually drawing his servos along the huge mech's warm sides in the protective silence and holding him for as long as he needed. Then Prowl fell into recharge, unafraid of the consequences of being found curled on his partner's chest.

As always, it was clandestine and unspoken—but the greatest of things had to be felt, not said or admitted. When he rebooted, it took him a few sleepy cycles to realize that Lockdown was already online, but was still curled around him, heavy and quiet. Somehow, he had tumbled (or been shifted and tucked) off of Lockdown's chest and into his lean side, and now lay with his head flush to the older mech's collar, arms folded to his chassis. Regardless of his hours-ago confidence, he couldn't help the 'caught' rush of preparatory static along his tensors, but Lockdown did not move to push him from his berth. They simply reclined, ship beeping and breathing around them.

Once more, nothing was said: Prowl expected progress, not miracles, and that was simply the way they were--and the way they always would be.

It wasn't certain whether Lockdown had waited until he was online before touching him or if it was the contact that made the sensitive mech stir, but Prowl became aware of the bounty hunter's blue digits wandering over the front of his chassis, masculine and easy as always, but uncharacteristically absent-minded. Prowl, logic drive nearly backing up, lay in the close, warm dark and let himself be touched. He knew that to move or draw attention would be to break this odd moment Lockdown had been tricked into, but the bounty hunter was the one to shift, craning his long neck slightly when he reached the ugly bump of the welding line he'd sizzled across the slice in his partner's chassis.

The mech had to admit, functional as he was, he was unduly fond of Prowl's flawless black exostructure and he didn't like to see pretty (and functional) things stay unrepaired--especially as he was no damn cosmetic welder. He cleared his vocals, finding it a little bit hard to pull himself together with the silky weight of the tune-up on his processor and his freshly-woken partner bundled against him.

"Y'can get that fixed once we get to a planet that does bodywork," Lockdown muttered, narrowing his gruff touch to a pressing finger. Prowl looked down as well, following the lumpy matte bulges of the scar.

"I think not."

Lockdown drew back just enough to look at him with a blank surprise, gaze tempered with the implicit discomfort of the explicit situation, but Prowl only shook his head.

"I appreciate it," he said coolly, gazing unflinchingly into Lockdown's red optics, now completely at ease with the half-conversation and the slippery sideways situation. He shifted contentedly under Lockdown's half grip, utterly soothed and thrumming with belonging. "It is unwise to erase the physical scars of what should be remembered. Such things remind me of what I have."

Prowl smiled like he was truly, quietly happy with what he had: it was lying right in front of him, arching his tattooed brow. Lockdown was all he had, true, but it wasn't as desperate a realization as he'd expected it to be. No, after so many years, it was… right.

"It stays," Prowl murmured, and leaned forward to give his partner a ghostly, encompassing touch.

The ninjabot nudged up and actually brushed that warm cheek against Lockdown's white temple with a brief pass (kiss) of his fingers along the other's jaw, then slid off his berth like a good dream. Soundless. Lockdown was unaware of how long he lay with his chin on his forearm and watched the open door after the little bot's smooth retreat, saturated with a contentment so strong (so disturbing) it made his dark, normally crisp Spark strain at its chamber walls in a fuzzy sparking cocktail of pleasure and dumb certainty: something he'd never gotten from his line of work and certainly never expected to get from a _person_. There was little else to consider at this point, however, and less still to protest. The vote was in.

Somehow, somewhere, he'd fallen for the kid. Hard. On the plus side, it was less of a personal defeat than he'd ever imagined it to be.


	17. Rehabilitation

A/N: So. This is… kinda disappointing?

Obviously, I know that Ffnet is a BIG place, and even if people post robosmut here all the time… I'm going to play it safe and keep the kiddies minds intact, yay! This is only half the chapter: for those of you who are eighteen, tarry on over to Adultfanfiction (under the SN of Deedaday, by the chapter name) and read it in its smutty entirety. I know it's lame, but if you're eighteen, it's just a bit more typing!

Otherwise, um, this is just a shaft-teaser—loaded with implications but functionally tame. A lame update for non-legal kids D: SORRY KIDDIES. On the bright side, you still get to see how much of a prude Prowl is! HAH.

Also? OH MY GOD. You guys are so freaking nice--Idon'tknowwhattoSAYholyhells. Thank you SO AUGHHH MUCH for all of your gushings and kind words and suggestions! I suck them all in, one at a time, and I promise my brain is chewing on 'em! Just... augh, thank you so much. You really, really make my day, everytime!

Happy Halloween, babies!

* * *

Rehabilitation

* * *

While feelings and nasty insinuations abound had been patched by the failed seduction, not a solar-cycle went by before the original root of the _original_ conflict sprang anew: how exactly to be certain that the young ninjabot could survive an overload without killing him in the process.

Luckily, Lockdown, possessing both skill and a monstrous stake in the now-open situation, was quick on the ball to solve it with a few… improvisations. Prowl (with nothing better to do and a solemn, nagging compulsion to be near the comfortably-silent bounty hunter) had watched Lockdown dig around for cycles with a crunched, irritated expression, practically dismantling his shop in search of various items of an unknown purpose. After snatching, inspecting and tossing a dozen different oddities and tools, the hunched mech unearthed a spiny (and spine-y) looking blue device about the length of his servo, considered it for a moment, then proceeded to nose around for metal tubing of a particular diameter… the piecemeal process went on and on. Prowl was oddly content to drowse in Lockdown's scraped-up shop chair as the older mech worked with an efficiency and upfront skill that once again made Prowl feel the slightest bit proud (and awestruck) of the scar around his chassis.

Lockdown eventually settled down at his table, optics thinned in concentration with his rare magnifier hooked onto his temple, lending him a ridiculously professional look. After an inordinately patient amount of laser-and-wire fiddling with the blue prickly thing (and several 'tests' of dabbing the glowing tip against his wrist), he shoved it into a freshly cut length of pipe then sealed either end with a gush of white heat, leaving a blue knob exposed at the far end. The interested ninjabot assumed him to be done, but Lockdown glared blankly at the sharp-edged, quite cylindrical end of the cylinder then decisively slathered it with fresh silver solder, shaping it against a table until it was rounded, blowtorch angled perfectly as his dense arms worked it to smoothness. He rewarded the finished product with a thin smirk then glanced over at Prowl with the same expression, receiving nothing but a foggy head-tilt from his partner.

"Done," he said, flicking the blowtorch off and retracting that ridiculous magnifier.

It was pleasing, to see him working so earnestly on something. Lockdown's 'shop time' was no longer a thinly veiled excuse for avoiding him, and the patient little ninjabot rather liked _seeing_ Lockdown think: the calculating whiz of his roaming optics, or the sudden, fluid decision to toss something away and reach for something else. Bundles of mathematical calculations and instinctive logic, all unspoken. Unpretentious and sure to the point of Zen. It happened so quickly and so naturally that few would think it note-worthy, but if one thing could be said about Lockdown, it was that he always knew what he was doing.

Unless, of course, it involved Prowl. The half-curled ninjabot cocked his head slightly, blue visor trained on the item in Lockdown's huge servo.

"What is it?"

As if honoring their (Prowl's) new insistence on communication, Lockdown made sure to avoid breezing by an explanation.

"It's a… uh, somethin' to jumpstart systems. Electric current. Pretty rough—not somethin' you'd risk on a healthy 'bot--but I modded it. Piqued the frequency and insulated it. It'll suit."

Prowl looked up at his partner, long face crumpled (pouting) in confusion: Lockdown had yet to reveal how it applied to _him_. Before he could ask, the bounty hunter tossed it into his lap with a growing, feline grin. Prowl caught it with a small clank.

"Tap it."

Sending a dubious glance his way, Prowl touched the rounded tip. It was as though a tiny glass seed of light had popped in his local physical sensors; he immediately snatched his hand back, staring down at the tingling grey digit. Then—yes, it was tuned a little higher than most activators, but he couldn't have missed the distinct flare of (incoherent) pleasure at the tip of his digit after the initial numbness ceased. It was so… acute.

Prowl's processor ate through the possibilities as the warmth faded: Lockdown had somehow finagled a double-layered frequency that would only activate pleasure sensors—or rather, was built to call out the pleasure-sensor facet of any one (or all) of a Cybertronian's chameleon, multi-purpose sensory bundles. The numbness was only his sensors making the forced switch before the stimulating electric current hit. He marveled at the mechanics of it, quietly turning it over in his servos, then realized Lockdown was still watching him expectantly.

"This is… advanced," he murmured, his simple praise earning him a wide, roguish smile.

"When you've been around long as I have, you pick up a thing or two about exclusive sensory stimulation."

Prowl looked down at the device again. Unfortunately, it didn't sound like a stabilizing component, and, as much as Prowl could have kicked himself for having the gall to underestimate his partner at this point, he didn't like the idea of having that moderately sloppy thing soldered into his chassis—even if it would restore their… situation.

"How do we install it?" He asked uncertainly, gingerly holding it out for his partner. Lockdown grinned, snapping the magnifier off of his white temple and tossing it onto the table.

"We don't."

Somehow, Prowl didn't like the way Lockdown said that—almost as though Prowl's cool naiveté was amusing. His nudging fears were only confirmed when the bounty hunter rapped the contraption with his red knuckles and pointed past it, straight to the ninjabot's prim, gold-lined chassis.

"Overload yourself with that," Lockdown ordered him over his spiked shoulder, turning to drag a bench closer with a metal-on-metal squeak. "And I'll see if you run into any glitches along the way."

Prowl's head snapped up in shock, mouth open, visor stretched wide. Lockdown, unruffled by his partner's full-body paralysis, simply settled himself onto the bench, crossed his arms across his barrel chest… and waited.

And waited.

"… _What_?"

"Oh. If y'need some… solitude…" Lockdown chuckled, using the word sweepingly; pointedly plucking the word for 'alone-time' from Prowl's own dignified vocabulary. The ninjabot's aghast expression only intensified, grip slackening around the device. "Y'know. Get your engines hot…"

Already Lockdown was brimming with oily enjoyment, wide mouth curling at the edges. He heaved himself to his feet and sauntered away with a practiced air, leaving Prowl with nothing but himself and a sordid, cylindrical fate--certainly no excuses, protests or possible escape clauses.

The cold, metal, empty-shop reality of it all refused to sink in. He was only able to look at the insidious little device after three solid cycles of choking on the idea, then frostily placed the thing on the arm of Lockdown's chair and scooted away. The hunter had left him alone to—but would _come back_ to--he would not do it. He _could_ not do it. This was--he glared at the doorway and his abhorrently vicious partner beyond it, his very Spark quailing and retreating from the very _notion—_

Finally, after cycles of compressed thrashing and righteous vacillations (and unyielding silence from the bridge), Prowl gingerly, hopelessly picked up the stimulator. Mouth pressed into a beastly frown, he fiddled with it as intelligently as he could, suddenly finding the before-clever thing to be the most inane, brutal device he'd ever come across as it sent sloppy, indiscriminate surges of sensation wherever he touched it. His humiliation only swelled higher as he found he couldn't even handle it properly, jumping and wincing as it connected where it wasn't supposed to, making sensors deaden then flare up like open-mouthed suns. Touch—jerk, clatter, _shudder_. Officially fed up with it, Prowl made a grinding, growling sound of raw frustration as it clanked into his (very sensitive by this point) lap for the second time.

"Don't make me come in there," Lockdown called from the bridge, causing the young mech's facial plating to nearly burst into flames. Prowl could practically _hear_ his nasty, merry, gap-toothed grin, and glared up at him with all the indignation and hatred his noble body could hold when the huge mech appeared in the doorway, leaning easily on it.

"This is humiliating," Prowl said icily, digits hooked around the stimulator as though it were an enemy he'd just subdued.

"Just consider it a real blast of a diagnostic," Lockdown chuckled, gesturing lazily at his seething partner. "I gotta see how my bike is runnin' before I take you… off-road."

Prowl couldn't do much more than snort, but after a moment he seemed to curl up more tightly in Lockdown's huge chair, holding the device as far away from him as possible—as though it were dirty.

"Isn't there another way?" He asked stiffly, the red backlighting of the shop blurring his expression.

"Nope," Lockdown said simply, but continued to watch his classically collected partner fidget and slump, optics narrowing in an itching, honest curiosity. Curiosity, however, couldn't keep him from advancing his objective.

After a few cycles of stalling silence, the bounty hunter moved from the doorway and crossed the shop, heavy footfalls ending in front of Prowl, who didn't look up. Wordlessly, Lockdown liberated the gimmick from Prowl's stingy grip, upped the intensity with a twist of the exposed knob and unceremoniously engulfed the back of the ninjabot's bowed head with a huge servo. He shoved his partner down across his own lap, ignoring the baffled protest and the servos that groped for purchase on his green-striped thighs, and forced the stimulator underneath the golden seat on Prowl's backside, pressing it into the tight gap at his lower back.

Prowl immediately arched, consumed by hard-edged numbness that burst into teeth-gritting, girder-deep goodness—or, what would have been good if it hadn't been driving into him with the jerking, rattling abandon of a jackhammer. He choked from the pure magnitude of it, servos fastening on any part of Lockdown he could grab and claw into as the hot feeling pounded through his back and took swipes at his startled Spark. He writhed as much as he could with his head wedged against his unfazed partner's hip, unable to do anything but make crushed animal noises, then managed to snap:

"_Stop_."

The response was instant. The sensory attack died into fizzling silence and, faster than Prowl could resurface from the consuming, function-blotting sensation, he was flat against the back of his chair. Lockdown's red optics glowed in front of him, white face dented in _worry_.

"Slag. You feel a flutter?"

The bounty hunter touched his chassis expertly, pressing and sensing the chug of his anxious, utterly spooked systems. Prowl gasped heavily, then shook his head.

"No."

"Somethin' snap?"

"No." Prowl shook his head again, optics shuttering as his body slowly ceased quivering. "I cannot… it's unbearable."

Lockdown looked at him like he was insane, servos dropping from Prowl's heaving chassis.

"That's the _point_," he growled, stung at getting all riled up for nothing. "Keep goin'."

He flung the stimulator back into Prowl's lap with the same mild disgust as the order, eyeing him in fresh annoyance as he sat down on the bench across from his chair—figuring, finally, that this wasn't going to get anywhere without him on the watch. Prowl, however, looked at device in his pretty servos like it would bite him, disgust and… yes, fear etched into his face. Shame. The kid was absolutely ashamed: Lockdown picked up the idea like a weirdly glowing treasure, turning the absurd prospect over in his processor.

The kid was a (passive-aggressive) sex-fiend with him. Alright, he was never quite sure when the other was in the mood, or if Prowl _had_ a mood, but Prowl sought it himself after hunts and had only turned Lockdown away a handful of times—which was _remarkable_, considering how often the wanton mech approached him. Now, when asked to do something as simple as self-service (even with a unwanted bonus of practical voyeurism), his hardwired morals went all buggy on him.

Lockdown couldn't understand it: pleasure was pleasure. Good was good, and therefore certainly not bad. Especially considering Prowl's obnoxious grasp (fervent cling) of decorum, it was hard to believe that setting himself off in a convenient, purposeful fashion would rate below their racy, groan-saturated, ridiculously prolonged 'face-fits on the 'dignity' scale. What Lockdown wouldn't—and couldn't—consider was meaning. In truth, connection-motivated Prowl quailed at something so practical and hollow, but Lockdown pushed past that sentimental concept before it could freak him out too badly.

"Primus, haven't you ever set yourself off before?"

Any fresh-minted 'bot who'd ever been given access to anything with a steady current usually learned to turn it to the best use, but Prowl shook his head, short and sharp; his long face nearly screwed up in self-conscious, convenient anger and frustration. Before it could be realized and expelled as a tangible force, however, Prowl's features dropped alarmingly as he simply gave up, conflicted beyond words or anger.

"Can't we just…" His vocals were absolutely miserable, but still desperate enough to wound.

"Then I'd be dead in the water and wouldn't be able to _do _anything if you crashed," Lockdown ground out, annoyed at the other 'bot's squirming, pouting tenacity. He took a moment to glare down at Prowl, who wasn't even looking at him. "This is to test your systems, remember--not some weird thing I been dyin' to try."

Prowl managed to half-smile, but the quirk of his mouth disappeared as quickly as it came. Kid was really broken up about it.

"I ain't embarrassed," Lockdown snorted finally, slurring the alien word. "Why should you be?"

Prowl was almost being shy. It annoyed the bounty hunter more than charmed him: vulnerability wasn't something he cherished. He liked it better when the little punk surprised him with a feisty kick in the gut every so often and showed that real _mean_ little Spark off while rammed between his legs, restrained by his arms. That turned him on like crazy. This… was like watching his only identifiable equal hide in a corner and wave a little white flag, and Prowl was so genuinely miserable he couldn't even take the piss out of him for it.

Honestly, he hadn't quite looked forward to watching Prowl stimulate himself to overload. It was just the only way. He wasn't a voyeur: unless he had his scented, thick servos in it, it didn't truly interest him. It wasn't _awkward_; it was just a chore. It would be more of a chore if Prowl _did_ run into technical difficulties on the road to blowing himself out temporarily and not just because Lockdown would have to spring into action to fix him and save him from possible full-system arrest, but because watching the erotic mess would leave him horny as hell and problems meant still _longer_ 'till he could pound his ninjabot senseless. All in all, not enjoyable.

Finally, faced with the prospect of roundabout megacycles of steadily-more-flinty coaxing and a very unresponsive ninjabot and a severe urge to get the whole circus over with, Lockdown gave in.

"Kid, you are one glitched little machine," he exhaled gruffly. With a few grunts, he lowered himself to the cold shop floor, then raised an arm and flicked his fingers, motioning for his partner. "Get your aft over here."

Prowl, still mortified, took a moment to register the demand. Then he carefully slipped out of the oversized chair and approached his seated partner awkwardly, head low and stimulator in (guilty) hand. Still, a flicker of hope and confusion crossed his flexible visor as Lockdown reached out for him with a strong servo.

"I thought—"

Lockdown snagged his wrist and weighed him into his huge lap, quickly maneuvering the smaller mech to rights before taking the thick cylinder from him. The bounty manipulated it in his dexterous servo that he always put on for mod-working, holding it like a knife.

"Can it and focus on overloading," he ordered, then snuck in a quick nip to Prowl's nape, warm, oil-scented vapor brushing the young mech's back. "If half of this is in the processor, your half could knock out a whole."

-.-.-.-.-

And so forth.

(Just so ya know, he passes the test. Which leads to MORE interfacing you can't know about! XD)


	18. Wild Art

A/N: Thought-doodle. The more I write about these two, I realize they have a lovely amount in common alongside their beautiful contrasts!

(An ardent 'please forgive me' to those who got gypped by the last chapter XD)

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Wild Art

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

After so many stellar-cycles of coexisting with the bounty hunter, it was hard to generate epiphanies regarding his convoluted, crusty nature anymore and, Prowl realized, there was little advantage to gain by trying to understand him.

Prowl had adapted to his odd situation as fully as possible, and that always meant a certain measure of mental prioritizing: easy acceptance of his partner's established traits, no questions asked. For instance, he had been fully aware of Lockdown's intelligence since their first encounter, when he disguised Moot as a warehouse to avoid detection. While that sharp gift had gained more than a few attractive dimensions since the ninjabot had joined Lockdown and seen the extent to which he _thought_, it was still comfortingly standard. He took the trait for granted, distinctions and specializations untapped. If Prowl took time to consider every facet of Lockdown's personality, after all, he would spend most of his time horribly confused, grasping for connections that simply weren't common in socially healthy 'bots… so he limited himself to whatever concerned him at the moment in order to avoid singing his processor.

Discriminate and well-trained as he was, however, he had to smile when a sparkling epiphany that had been brewing for at least a decade blossomed into his processor as Lockdown, with a curt twist of his clunky servo, blew up a bridge.

It wasn't, of course, the act of devastation that sealed the realization: Lockdown was made for destruction. It was the way he went about it that caused Prowl to stall. He was… talented, and such talent did not come free. Whenever a job required booby-traps, much like their current expedition, there came an immediate and startling change in the bounty hunter. Prowl was excluded from these missions in the technical sense: this was Lockdown's territory, even if the ninjabot was still essential for backup if everything went to Pit. After receiving such a job, ever-chuckling Lockdown went silent, shifting with tireless purpose between his shop and the bridge, where the surface geography of the planet in question was rotating, colorful detail-screens stacked on either side. He did not speak to his partner, simply sucked into the magnificent cunning of his craft—whether to use tire-spikes or pressure-sensitive mechanics, or a simple cave-in.

Hunched over the monitor, blunt digits tapping away, Lockdown planned for fall-throughs; he planted fail-safes. He _prepared_, and was damn conscientious about it. It was a far cry from bursting into a hostage situation, guns blazing, without a lick of forethought (which he was more than fond of, especially when he had a shiny new toy to try out), but the bounty hunter was equally adept in both. Prowl's partner didn't play well with others, but if it came to a stake-out, he had glaring patience enough for an army. With every job, it was a shock to realize, Lockdown did a conniving, amoral, vicious… honest day's work.

Prowl never saw Lockdown more satisfied—not vindicated, but brimming with personal, rumbling, hard-earned satisfaction—than when a trap hunt was properly pulled off. They were a Pit of a lot of work and twice as time-consuming, but he also shone with gritty, grinning pride when they snapped down and caught his not-clever-enough meal-ticket, expression just as gleeful whether the catch was accompanied by a receptor-rattling explosion or a near-silent, curt snap. After such hunts, the thorny mech was a veritable saucy feline, lounging around and making playful overtures and _almost_ being affectionate, and Prowl, baffled though he was, always warmed to see him… happy.

A good bit of it had to do with ego, and Prowl accepted that. As much as he enjoyed getting one over on his target and proving his own oil-scented superiority, however, Lockdown also understood the negative feedback system of a business venture such as his own and his reputation was as valuable a commodity as his ship—nearly physical in its presence and necessity. There was, however, something beyond that ego and that necessity, something wonderful and clever and natural that shone through in these machinations. What with the conscientious dedication and creativity Lockdown devoted to this profession, plus his extensive mod customizations… Prowl came to the smiling realization that his partner wasn't just a fire-power-obsessed, greedy, cheap-trick hunter--and not everyone could do his job.

The bridge crumpled, bringing down much more than high-stacked stone. Lockdown didn't grin until a specific armored tram plunged into the waiting water—one of a confounding procession, all identically marked—and, as observed on carefully placed underwater cameras, sunk deeper than all the others. It was a simple trick of physics, that the heaviest tram would hit the hardest and thus sink deepest—useful, when the much-wanted resistance leader they were retrieving was a solid 2588 pounds and escorted by a host of identical, ridiculously well-armed trams for the express purpose of preventing an attack just like this.

Lockdown dabbed at his joystick for a careful split-klik, then pressed another button; a small gun mounted on the bottom of the aforementioned cameras shot a pellet full of paint at the now-resurfacing tram, splattering neon orange over its green side. The water would blur it, but not enough to make it unidentifiable. In the chaos of the crash, it would be simple to ride over to the pathetically bobbing vehicles on a stolen water-craft, prize open the orange-caked door and snatch Dendo from his prison—if only to deliver him to a far, far more concerned enemy. Then, they would be gone.

It was done with, just as simple as that. Expertly engineered victory.

When the bounty hunter switched off his cloaking device and moved from the cliff face, hard face split with a curling grin as he shouldered a rather large, green-lit gun with a sound of relish, Prowl could only smile with an amused, long-overdue surprise.

"Lockdown."

His partner turned, cocking a brow at Prowl's odd expression. The ninjabot chuckled hazily, hidden optics searching the other mech's face with an almost astounded air.

"You are… an _artist_," Prowl murmured ardently, one servo to the crushing, sloshing chaos of his assault, another to the towering mech himself.

Lockdown actually thought about it for a cycle, turning it over silently in his processor as the time window of his trap-completion narrowed. Then, a mischievous look seizing his tattooed face, he turned and leered at his partner over his shoulder, growling suggestively:

"F'it turns you on, I'm one Pit of an artist."

Prowl smiled and simply shook his head as Lockdown transformed and roared off without another word, because that was truly all he had to say to Prowl or about art in general. Classic, truly. But a visceral art-form developed naturally instead of cultured by critical and institutionalized training was often the wildest and truest of all, and the ninjabot couldn't help but appreciate a fellow practitioner—even if he didn't quite understand him.

They still had time for that.


	19. Intervention

A/N: Enolianslave, how much do I love thee? Why, with the passion of a thousand suns! You light my world, you give me SUCH smiles—you fill my head with outrageously hilarious ideas of Swindle's devious attempts to lure Lockdown away from Prowl!

You heard it, people. This is ALL Eno's fault, and I worship her for it :D The world needs more Swindle! And Swindle-Lockdown shenanigans are win! (Also—back-reference to another chapter for this one. Uh. 'Ultimate Turn-Off?'. Yep.)

Augh, Swindle is SO much fun to write (just forgive his copious parenthesis: it's just what he does. See?). Also, I've realized I have a fetish for alliteration. Is this bad?

* * *

Intervention

* * *

If it wasn't obvious, Swindle didn't appreciate Prowl.

The little Autobot was… troublesome, to use a functional term. He made trouble. What was trouble? Upset. A nuisance. A refused job, a missed call, a _monkey-wrench_; the 'bot was a dent in a perfectly waxed bumper. Walking into a perfectly greased system of contracts and exchanges with no respect for the seamless beauty of it, he scrambled the code (and coding) of a Big Name Player and drove beautifully inflexible Lockdown… to compromise.

_Compromise._

What was compromise? To undermine or devalue something by making concessions. _Concessions_. Did that sound positive? Of course not. It was a bleeding, a sapping of muscled reputation! No, the little glitch was nothing but a net negative for his compadre; all show and no _go_. He was a literal space barnacle, whittling away at Lockdown's resources and values—and there sat the bounty hunter with nothing but a warm berth, unaware that his pretty partner was actually an oozing financial sickness.

The diagnosis? Terminal.

Though such it may seem like very strong language, that was hardly the case. Swindle's implicit aversion wasn't passionate or even anything to fume about: Swindle simply didn't _fume_, and even when he did, the free-flowing thermal energy was always funneled towards some devious greater cause. The purple-plated mech was slick and efficient and tirelessly focused, even in his growling displeasure; even with this new _project_. No, his concerns were professional because he knew how rare well-connected, amoral mechs like Lockdown were, and he valued his own glistening prosperity above any misconceived attempts at… _contentment_ or whatever ridiculous concept the sociopath bounty hunter was shooting for with this cohabitation stunt. No, Lockdown was one in a zeb-trillion, and _there_ was the Skalgovian bladder-bug (Autobot) in his ripe fruit.

If Swindle had a say in anything, he would find a way to cheerfully, passive-aggressively, tacitly rip the brat out of Lockdown's existence. Not maliciously, understand, not _personally_--but for the greater neutral independent good. For _Lockdown_.

For himself, really, but that was understood.

His interactions with his distracted business associate were short and function-curtailed as always, so he had little time to bring up his… concerns about the obvious spiral of his pal's business morals. Lockdown, however, was a primal, sensory sort of model: one where well-crafted counseling or aromatic implications were to go as amiss as uploading poetry into a cleaner drone. No, he needed direct input to integrate and taste and churn to a conclusion in his sharp little CPU. Demonstration; experience. Of course, he would never get that show if he were tied down by his tiny-waisted ball and chain, but Swindle was a tad too determined to accept the stagnant state of things. Leaving events up to chance was a fool's way of surrender.

Faced with these facts and the chilling alternative, devious, devious Swindle began to think that a well-orchestrated intervention was in order—and who _better_ to conduct it than the maestro of professional accord himself? With all his sparkling negotiation skills and a few cubes of high-grade, he was certain he could make the unprincipled, business-smart life of lecherous irresponsibility and Lockdown reach an… agreement.

After all, they had gotten along so _well_ before.

* * *

"C'mon, guy, you look a little _drained_. Let's go buzz a few! It's been too _long_! I know this _great_ little place, three planets down from your current position, holed away in a—"

He didn't know why Swindle had bothered to _coax_ him. If anyone had flashed a sign with a badly-etched cube on it, he would've jumped for it: the dour desperation was wired into every section of his body, if it wasn't slagging radiating from him. Swindle knew weakness like he knew money (with a gleeful, stroking intimacy), and he zeroed in for the kill a scant three cycles after Lockdown answered the call. When he'd muttered and growled his general consent, Swindle turned on that gleaming plastic grin and cooed:

"_Good_ _mech_! I'll have you back with the little lady by shut-down time—in one piece, to _boot_!"

It was the wrong thing to say, but that wasn't about to stop him from coming along. No, that promise (a bare-faced, sunny lie from Swindle that would turn out to have a terrifying truth) didn't please him: in fact, one of his core motivations for gallivanting with Swindle was the solid, star-stuffed distance it would put between him and the kid.

It was all a learning experience. His many stellar-cycles functioning alongside the Autobot had taught him (or at least presented the information to him: he often didn't bother to learn from it) of the kid's likes and dislikes; his moods and quiet needs. For example, Prowl liked organic scrap, node-numbing silence, folding himself up in odd positions and humming… and having his fairings bitten at the base when he was feeling frisky. Time, however, also revealed the less… enjoyable side of the ninjabot and the two hunters didn't exactly have a stress-free existence, which only exacerbated any uncomfortable situation—not to mention the resulting lessons.

Prowl, it turned out, could be a stoic, cold, persnickety, withholding and _malicious_ little 'bot and, as it also turned out, Lockdown had limits.

Even when presented with everything he could need, the kid had been abusing his privileges. His 'moods' were not a valid excuse by this point, unless 'mood' (the word had to be spat or sneered) now indicated an on-going, virulent funk lasting a week or more. Their safety word—a curt and simple 'stop'—had been popping up more and more. Lockdown could take it for a while, sure, for sake of basic accord. He would bite his lip and _respect_ the inhospitable 'bot's little snit-fits even as Prowl began refusing him (with that damnable jaded sigh) earlier and earlier into the game… until the very act of _walking into his room_ prompted a chilly, deadpan "stop" from Prowl, who didn't even bother to turn around. Lockdown couldn't take it after that; he nearly ripped the kid's head off right then and there. In fact, the only thing that saved him from outrageous bodily harm was Swindle's call.

Needless to say, the bounty hunter needed some time to cool off. As Swindle was so winningly tepid in matters of relationships, he was the perfect mech for the job. Unaware of the other mech's internal wheelings and dealings, Lockdown fell for the chance to decompress and let his optics take a break from burning imaginary holes through the back of Prowl's head, and docked Moot a scant half-megacycle later, exiting without a word of cherished explanation. His standards were pitifully low: so long as he got off their damn matchbox of a ship and away from Prowl, the evening would be considered a success.

Swindle (solicitously early as always) was already seated in the mech-proofed booth of the dim little bar when Lockdown arrived, still stomping around in his 'face-deprived huff. The go-getter arms-dealer made sure to peg his companion with a pseudo-airy joke or three about his absent partner in the first five cycles: the dense, unhappy grunts he got in return were a brilliant start. Some preparatory banter and a low-quality cube or two loosened the bounty hunter up enough to permit a properly contrite relocation to more charming bar—one conveniently situated three steps and a low-intensity force-field from a glitzy, rambunctious, superbly smutty stripped show.

Though this was Swindle's first opportunity to actively pair the concepts of Lockdown and Mature Entertainment in his processor, one look at the older mech's face told him all he needed to know. The grizzled grin was self-explanatory: just like always, Swindle had made the right choice. He was, after all, paid to please.

Of course, the night's preparatory shenanigans didn't cease there. Given a few well-placed (and well-crafted, owing to the mark of maker on the stripper's blue-striped aft) distractions, Swindle began to peak Lockdown's drink with energon crystals. He plinked them, one after the other, into the thick pink syrup of his friend's disgusting cube (laced with musky jet fuel) until the super-saturated stuff was fairly pulsing at the cube in a snarling effort to get out and go spawn its own intelligent civilization. By that time, of course, Lockdown was buzzing too hard to notice—what, did Swindle look like the careless type? No, he was an old hat at this game. He'd cheerily spiked, altered, peaked and poisoned his way through too many a business negotiation to fumble at serving the (responsible) same to his dear, ignorant companion.

Though Swindle had no idea why his bounty-hunting bud was in such a state, he could only praise his good fortune and press forward: Lockdown was angry at the ninjabot, and that was all that mattered. Lockdown would talk freely to him in most, if not any, circumstances, even if personal inquiries or concern between the two were… beyond abnormal. While getting the bounty hunter slag-faced certainly greased the wheels, however, there was also the slight (infinitesimal, downright unnatural) chance that he might _refuse_ Swindle's (more than generous) upcoming offer due to the manipulation of the Autobot. Swindle didn't like to run that through his processor, and so instantly decided that full-stall slag-faced was the best state for that night's operations.

In his own way, of course, he was enjoying the night. Neither of them really had what were considered _friends_, so a chance to kick back and disengage their hydraulics over a cube of high-grade was precious and rare. Yes, beings certainly cycled in and out of each of their drifting lives, and there was always the gleaming possibly of getting overcharged with prospective clients… but then there was also the nasty mirroring possibility of being killed under the table by said prospective client. This was safer: each was all the other had in ways of easy-going, equal-standing drinking buddies, and even with his schemes lending a ghoulishly intent feel to every action, Swindle still found it in himself to enjoy the basic fact of having _company_.

In their own emotionally sterile way, they valued the other too much to bring him to harm. Death? Was inconvenient and injurious to gross pay. Call it soulless objectivism, but the fact remained that they felt safe with one another--which was a _marvelous_ helping factor for Swindle in spiking Lockdown's drink. Things, as they said, were off to a running start.

Still, nothing short of being doused could keep the ever-eager businessman away from his passion, so the arms dealer found his thoughts straying towards prospective clients and circumstantial what-nots. He firmly pulled himself back, giving the brightly-painted femmes (and an androgynous mech) a passing glance as he tried to focus on Lockdown. The bounty hunter was his reason for being there, after all, and he talked to Lockdown in the most ordinary way possible, grousing perfunctorily about dropped deals and trying to slip in truths whenever he was able. Finally, after a joking mention of the multi-purpose programming of the stripped models, he hit platinum.

Lockdown chuckled appreciatively but shook his beastly head, sharp red optics locked on the stage.

"'Least I'm not payin' for it with the kid."

"Ah, but you are," Swindle countered smoothly, raising a staying digit. "Fifty-fifty split ding a diode?"

The other mech's face fell slightly, though whether through confusion or disapproval was uncertain.

"That's different. He's good for other things," Lockdown growled.

"Such as?"

Obviously nothing good enough to keep simple, hedonistic Lockdown from grinning at a lovely femme who wiggled her (artificial) wings at him and performed a charming double-jointed gyration of her trim hips.

"… Gimme a cycle, I'll search a few."

With that insincere, distracted mutter, the burly mech may as well have surrendered outright. Ah, loyalty—Swindle loved the sound it made when it hit the ground and shattered into a billion fiddly pieces. He grinned to himself, over-large purple orbs alight with the roguish (and well-executed) charm of his venture. He surveyed the scene of debauchery with a glassy, brightly scientific interest, even as he obligingly thumbed in a few (few being the key term) credits on a clingy stripper's pelvic tip-screen. Then, he sat back to watch the fireworks.

Night tumbled on, gaining tangible velocity through the nightmarish glow of high-grade and the throb of music. Their simple evening grew more extravagant in thick gulps and digital credits punched in, so close to the exposed wiring of luscious bots. After a while—a well-observed idealization of a perfectly calculated time-span, consisting of two megacycles and three times as many cubes of high-grade (_Primus_ did it take a lot to down a mech as thick as Lockdown) and an underhanded wireless system-check focusing on logic-drive efficiency and inhibitory circuitry, all charmingly whittled down to 'a while'—Swindle set the finale of his plan into motion. In all blunt terms, he initiated a professional transaction he knew his sensualist buddy couldn't resist.

He bought and paid for… a companion.

Exceptional in everything he did, Swindle was a professional peddler of satisfaction if not pleasure, fondly nudging his companion fondly along into the arms of unionized lechery. There was, after all, a whole great big beautiful world of warm, giggly, hired pleasure out there for the taking! Swindle was only too glad to be the one reintroducing him to it, showcasing what the world had to offer to mechs with minimal scruples and ample cash—and, indirectly, what he had been giving up by solitary-confinement with the cruel, sterile little Autobot.

Lockdown didn't have programming intact enough to say no. Possibly, he had never _had_ the programming necessary to say no. At that point, his world was limited to pulses of touch, light and sound—so when Swindle offered an opportunity to experience more of the first in a tingly, scraping sense, he could only grin and chuckle and grin some more. Putty. Supremely denied, 'face-starved putty, which was in fact the worst (best) kind of putty to be when around a mech as motivated as Swindle.

Swindle silently haggled out the price on the model's comm-frequency (posted at the side of the rink for just such a reason) with an unwavering smile, working her rates and services down with a showman's flair until she consented and cut him off just to shut him and his gooey drawl up. The PM was docked in the lazy, loose port of Lockdown's knees but a cycle later, drawing not a few envious stares from other mechs and femmes as she showcased her structural charms (trim aft, busty chassis, slender sloping arms and thick oh-so pink thighs) in a sexy little dance a scant three inches from his stupidly grinning face.

She shot Swindle a poisonous (if well-adjusted) look as the bounty hunter dared scrape a huge servo over the green-airbrushed curve of her aft—provocatively breaching the universal 'no touchy' rule. Slag, but she _hated_ over-charged morons and their well-moneyed friends. Mollifying herself with the fact that the spike-garnished factory reject probably hadn't gotten any in a decade or more, she perfunctorily upped the ante, grinding along his legs and stroking her fingers along Lockdown's chest-plating, which had warmed to a toasty degree.

The brute tilted his head back and rumbled as the front of his chassis split, just enough to reveal the happy luminescence of his chamber. Sighing, conscious of the creepy buyer's optics on her, she popped out her ticklers—red-lit electricity-gorged filaments built for sensory stimulation, stored in the tips of each pink digit—and brushed them down the glowing gap, swiping them like a key-card. The mech's energy field pulsed at the kiss of electricity, he tried to grope her aft again, and on her mediocre life went.

Finally, as a half-Sparked and rote safety measure, she ran 'the search'.

It was a safety check, standard issue programming with any union-employed pleasure model. She (or he) could run a 'bot's unique energy signature through their shockingly extensive database and see if any results came up: former instances of physical abuse, or even slights as petty as a failure to leave a tip. These bots were all-informed, and Lockdown was just soused enough (and just randy enough) to miss the utterly horrified look on the PM's pretty pink face once her search-quest came back.

The bastard had been around.

The 'transaction' continued. The only signs of anything out of the ordinary were the split-klik look of concentration she couldn't mask and the corresponding triple-beep of a nearby bouncer's audio receptor. He exited a moment later at a dark, hasty pace and the pleasure model smiled stiffly as Lockdown grinned at her blearily, brash servo once more inching toward her hip. Her rote dance became a touch more elaborate: gyrating and grinding, she twisted her trim body out of his jerking, questing grip at the last moment to prolong the situation, ticklers swooping in to ka-ching the gap in his hot chassis-plating just enough to keep him seated. If Swindle noticed the surge of motivation, he didn't say anything—he certainly wouldn't, if it appeared his almost-conquered companion was getting more of a dance out of his contracted entertainment. He never said no to freebies.

There was, however, a question or two to ask when the double doors of the club slammed open, admitting three hefty alien guards—one of whom was carrying freshly-booted stasis-cuffs.

"No one move and keep your mouths—er, your vocal processors… uh, offline--we'll be outta here before you can… blink," one of them announced wearily, blank green visor already searching the dark, mech-clotted corners of the carnal cloister. "Where's the offender?"

Half on the bounty hunter's spiny knees, the PM jumped away, viciously thrusting a tickler-lit finger at Lockdown's crumpled form—who looked up from the syrupy haze of his nice, satisfying evening to see three heavily-armed law enforcers advancing on him in unison. Fanged, screaming Pit broke loose in a matter of kliks. The rest of the stripped club rising from their seats in a nervous wave, Lockdown jumped up and nearly crashed into the PM, equilibrium chip totally shot from the pulse and tingle of the high-grade coursing through his tubing. Rattling his head, he managed to get himself straight, snarl a thick curse or three and strike Swindle across his arm before breaking into a booming sprint towards the back door.

Swindle had no idea what was going on. As it was, Swindle harbored a professional hatred for ignorance, especially when it involved guards and sticky legal repercussions and the possible implosion of a beautiful plan. He sputtered and shied and smiled as the guards stomped towards him, shouting between themselves as Lockdown broke out into the street and slammed onto the concrete in alt mode. Swindle rose from his seat, wincing as the bounty hunter burned at least a pound of rubber off his tires with a circuit-splitting screech.

"Woah, now! My friend was merely--I don't see the need for _rushing_ this, can't we negotia—"

He gagged as one of the guards slapped the cuffs over his extended wrist, nearly buckling under the nauseating pulse of sedation. The law-enforcer in question shouted something at him—doubtless a threat to take him in alongside his rascal buddy or something of the inane sort—but, oil rushing hard in his fuel-lines, Swindle immediately engaged his Vok forcefield, glossy purple energy knocking the creature over a nearby railing. Honestly _grimacing_ for the first time in decades, the arms-dealer dashed the cuffs across their table, shattering them, then took an entry out of Lockdown's datapad—vamoosed, and fast, with no closing statement in sight.

Some professional situations, as he'd found out, were unsalvageable. A speedy disengagement—in the form of roaring onto the streets and disappearing into the winding alleyways of Rontau in the hopes of gaining legal absolution through darkness--was sometimes the most profitable course of action.

While they knew enough about Cybertronians to come equipped with stasis-cuffs, the guards obviously failed to calculate the relative impossibility of locating two very, very mobile vagabonds in such a convoluted cityscape where the physical interference was too great to use tracking signals. Both mechs revved and sped and screeched around corners, taking alleys at random to put as much distance as possible between them and the whooping sirens. By pure luck, Swindle found Lockdown by nearly running headlong into him at a dark, narrow junction between two under-passes (the flare of headlights and following screech-swerve nearly spooked the Spark out of both of them) then continued fleeing alongside him until they reached an abandoned tram-yard of sorts.

With a decidedly exhausted, rough series of clanks, both transformed. Vertical no more than a klik, Swindle clunked to his knees, aspirating like he would cough up a fan-blade. Lockdown, already shaken by the sloppy shock of driving in an overcharged state, staggered to a nearby wall and made a gagging noise, steadying himself as he growled:

"Fraggin'—they n-never… wipe those damn… records, do they?"

"What—did—you—_do_?" Swindle heaved, purple optics narrowed to insidious little slits as he glared up from his undignified sprawl on the ground. Lockdown, bent over just as heavily, optics shuttered tightly, shook his head.

"Long, old story," he muttered. "Kinda… pushed it on a PM a millennia or five ago. Dinked her."

"Holy motherbo—_Lockdown_," Swindle half-shrieked, polished façade blown to bits by the battle of clawing to his pedes, disheveled and wheezing. Lockdown jerked around and glared at him, swallowing his dirty pink nausea enough to raise his vocals.

"We ain't even in the same galaxy-sector, how the… Pit was I s'posed to know it even mattered 'nymore?!"

Half-crouched in the dirty light of some far-off security lamps, both mechs refused to look at each other for the next few cycles, each boiling and fuming and mentally kicking at things in their own way: Lockdown at the sheer, heaving discomfort of the situation, Swindle at the utter _stupidity_ of the bounty hunter. How in the _universe_ could he have thought that time alone would absolve him of an inter-galactic offense? And the fact Lockdown had failed to tell him of it the moment they stumbled into the club—not to mention the sour end to his beautiful, meticulous plan!

No matter how quickly physical exertion sucked the edge off of a heady overcharge—best way to quell it, really--Lockdown was still considerably slag-faced… but sober enough, perhaps, to make one of the most defining decisions of his life. He limped over from the wall, sucking in a draught of clean, cold Rontau air and trying to bring his optics to focus on his still-hunched business contact.

"This was fun," he huffed thickly, deadpan earning him a wary, half-sick look from the arms-dealer. "But I… all things considered, think… I'll stick with the kid."

He took a few steps past the other mech, nearly toppling over, then fell into his chugging, ponderously puttering alt mode with the equivalent of a hiccup.

"'Least I get what I pay for with him," he groused, red headlights flaring. Swindle nearly gasped, reaching out in cold, doomed dread, echoing with the conceptual crash of a closing door.

"Wait—L-lockdown, buddy—back up a little, you haven't even--"

And he was off. Circuits sizzling in slow agony, Swindle waited until Lockdown was around the corner and well on his way to financial ruin before he slapped his forehead and cursed himself silly, finally collapsing in a miserable lump on the ground. It had been… a short night, but still hectic enough to wear down his gleaming showman's enamel. His ship was _ages_ away, and he just couldn't bring himself to shift into drive again after such a shaking disappointment. Exhausted and solidly thwarted (and obviously burdened with an overheated logic drive), he transformed and fell into ragged recharge, relatively safe as an inconspicuous vehicle in a gritty rural tram-yard… and woke up in an unfamiliar warehouse with a painful, scraping clamp on each of his tires.

Towed.

This, he figured after the first few excruciating moments of wiggling around in the restraints, was the universe trying to tell him something… and when the universe talked, he normally ignored it and squirmed himself into a cozy, lucrative loophole until it left him alone, but when it screamed and forced him to flee the smoking warehouse scene with a ridiculous limp, one of the boots still digging painfully into his heel, ever-sharp Swindle wised up. Despite his best efforts, it looked like Lockdown was stuck with the Autobot for now, until fate itself saw fit to crush the 'bot beneath its boots and return things to rights—and while Swindle would wait for that day with professional vengeance and a ready smile, he certainly wasn't going to stick his neck out to make it happen any faster. If it was all the same to fate, he'd rather not wake up with a boot on that, too.

Generosity, in his personal experience, was a glitch.


	20. Time

A/N: Ugh. Please remove all knives from the surrounding area before indulging? This one kinda made me sick to write. UGH. Just, uh. Remember how hypercritical and demanding Lockdown is, kay? This is a two-parter.

(And remember: 'Partners' takes place in an alternate universe where Megs actually succeeded with the space bridge, then cordoned off Earth to have his own little safari of finding the Allspark shards. The best recipe for sanity-draining trauma, obviously—hot damn, I really need to get started on those Earth stories.)

Um. I love Bumblebee. _Promise_.

(And, um… review? Peez?)

* * *

Time

* * *

By the time Prowl felt at all qualified to explain the complexities of his new life, he realized he had been away for a century—and the universe had gone on without him.

It was hard to remember, sometimes, that a world existed outside of their self-contained kingdom. The swells and crashes of the busy, breathing universe still shook their red boat, but it was never so messy, never so _personal_. They were too busy to bother with the massive moral-gorged world with all of its intertwined repercussions and thick-veined, crushing (and crushed) loyalties. Lockdown and Prowl were knitted into no tender net of society nor susceptible to nauseating seismic shocks of high-stacked, bird-boned economy: they floated free, landing only when the ground settled, or wafted by those shocks to new planets still pulsing with honey life and a vengeful soul or three. It was terrifying, how quickly and stealthily time—an obsolete measurement when tracked in identical stars and blank metal walls--passed when Prowl had no reason to pay attention to the rest of the universe.

For instance, Prowl was left to piece together from whisperings and half-snatched assumptions that, in his raw-edged absence, his war had been won.

The holy Autobots had claimed victory—barely. It was less a war than a prolonged, maddeningly habitual struggle, but nevertheless, they had restored and hidden the Allspark again and began anew the eternal oil-spattered chase. Even with Megatron's infiltration of Cybertron and his personal attention to the matter of the Allspark shards (scattered on a miserable, scarred blue-green planet eons away, no matter, no matter) they won, those righteous, red-stamped souls. That meant two things for the universe: it wasn't in pieces and it was on the slow road to recovery again. Recovery meant growth, and growth meant profit… and wherever there was profit, there was someone out to steal it by whatever means necessary, which pissed other people off.

In short, business was good.

Prowl was a master of selective attention, after a dry century of religious objectivity; of striding out of their bridge during briefings (to avoid names and people and alliances and souls—there was only the target). The war was no exception, even with the blank spot on his front. It didn't pay to think about what might have been involved in that distant puppet-show victory—who might have been lost in the process--so he didn't think. Most of the time. He had many things to keep himself occupied, after all: from biology articles to meditation to Lockdown… until there was suddenly nothing in the impersonal, echoing universe that could keep him from his own memory core.

The Autobots… had won. But there was far more to that grey war than mere cause—the broken 'bots who fought servo and Spark from that starved outpost on Earth, for example. Those unique, strong, admirable… friends. Regardless of whether the term still applied to himself—no, he was no longer a friend but a killing shadow and a _partner_—he couldn't sear the label from their clean-lined faces. Friends.

It was difficult, making the memories mesh. Each time Prowl dared break his internal stoicism, some lethal wire-cross worsened the pain: Bumblebee's nasal, yellow-charged laugh (of sunny Detroit and squealing Sari) looped over an image Prowl had absorbed two stellar-cycles after Bulkhead passed. The same unlaughing Scout crouched against a concrete wall, glaring, yellow plating scuffed up with dry dirt and oil-spatters. One cracked optic flickered, Spark brittle and acidic.

He was unsure why that particular image was so note-worthy (even if he knew why the laugh was), but the fact was, Prowl wasn't around much by the time he downloaded it. His interactions with his team were chilly and limited and growing chillier. He lurked, hovered and flitted off, ducking from the unbearable tension in the Autobot 'base'; caught in a lynch of heavy relations he'd been slightly uncomfortable with even when they were still capable of smiling. He ran, mourning what was formerly a home even as he wandered through charred remnants of forests and devastated canyon-cracked lake-beds. He knew, in a small way, that his surgical withdrawal had begun even before Lockdown's servo cupped his neck…but he could only hope for his _friends_, one hundred grey stellar-cycles away and faded at the primary-hued edges; the dysfunctional repair crew, the unlikely heroes that Prowl found himself unfit to number among.

But the more unlikely they were, the greater their story—wasn't that how the world worked?

* * *

By all accounts, he never should have found them.

If circumstance had not conspired with uncharacteristic helpfulness, with blind luck, they would have remained in the dark: Prowl didn't care to touch Lockdown's spare mods. Even if there were thousands of stories sitting on the tips of the stripped wires bristling out of every servo or claw or cannon, Prowl couldn't look at them without reliving, in a nauseated flinch, the moment they had been torn out. There was a dark, abrupt air to every one of them. It lessened partially when he'd seen them on Lockdown's wiry arms as an extension of his hard-handed ways, but thrown on the unlit shelf, they echoed of their former owners and the final, spark-spitting wrench…and Lockdown's sinister grin, monstrous silhouette blotting out the hard cataract of his table lights.

Prowl had been on the bounty hunter's extraction table twice and only twice, and the second had been for his intensive surgery. The first he didn't care to think about, even as Lockdown attempted a gnarled joke every few stellar-cycles—their 'negotiation table', as it were. Still, he was comfortable enough in the shop itself. He had lived around it too long to maintain a stiff, exhausting aversion to something so necessary, even if he always stayed within the circle of white light, more and more often lounging or watching his partner work as timeless time brought them spiraling closer (each stellar cycle gone marked a silent orbit of their own, two blind heavenly bodies drawn together by trembling gravity--closer to brushing star-centers each rotation).

Prowl was… safe, so long as he was in the bright, clinical light, and spared neither thought nor visual contact to what lay beyond it until it was on Lockdown's body. The shelves were Lockdown's business in the first place, and Prowl could live alongside them without rumination—until, for the first time in decades, the self-sufficient bounty hunter asked Prowl to fetch something from them. When pushed beyond that wall of red-tinted dark by Lockdown's grumble for a certain spare yellow-plated 'claw' servo (and his preoccupation with his current crouching task which involved exposed, sullenly sparking wires, not a few of which were his own), Prowl got up and sifted dutifully through the dead bits of complex metal, shifting things with the back of his hand and the tips of his digits, visor thinned. He passed through two shelves, then reached for the back of the third, drawn only by the drift of his own servo and the glint of yellow.

Stretching slightly, Prowl picked them up, not realizing what they were. The weight was normal, as were the tapered, tiered silver shapes—any one of any number of dead things, any fragment of any compact scout model. Only when he turned them over did he stop: the sharp blue glassing on the undercarriage glinted in the sparse light, one stinger cracked and smoke-marbled from a blowout. The layer of grey failed to obscure the lopsided heart scratched into the glass circle in the middle—painstakingly scrawled there by a small brown hand that had touched them all.

A bit of sunny yellow exostructure still clung to the base, right above the loose wires.

The stingers fell from his hands, crashing and rattling to the floor. He jerked away, a low animal noise bursting from his open mouth as something in him heaved and clenched viciously. Lockdown reared from his work and snarled at him, to _watch it_—but Prowl didn't hear it, optics locked on the… pieces. A nasal, yellow laugh looped in his processor.

_It was amazing, how a screech so small and tinny could fill the entire living room._

"_Are you sure about this?"_

"'_Sure' is my middle name!"_

Screech, scrape, scratch. _Careful_.

"_Autobots don't have middle names, Bumblebee."_

_"But if we did, mine'd be 'sure'! … Or 'Liquid Lightning'. Za-za-zing! Either or."_

_Past the sparkling allure of a new and entirely reversible paint job, Bumblebee (and the rest of the base, for that matter) didn't understand the point of personal _human_ modifications—or 'tattoos' and 'piercings' as they were called on Earth. They were useless, often disfiguring to the (albeit strange) exemplar of organic beauty and they _hurt_. If mods didn't shoot fire, crank up his speed or shield something from bigger, badder somethings, Bumblebee simply didn't see the purpose in going through poking, piercing, pinching pain just to make a statement—and a vague, knobby, unhygienic one, at that. _

_Sari finally quelled his yammering by explaining that the modification had to mean something incredibly important to the human—enough to permanently alter the finicky soft fabric of their bodies with cryptic pictures. That, however, birthed a whole new problem: Bumblebee wouldn't shut up (or stop surfing the internet for images, open-mouthed and, by the end of it, sounding more and more like a certain purple hacker) until he could find something that would reflect the pretentious mix of his self-proclaimed, oh-so daring 'style' and wit and make his equally 'dashing' statement...well, dashing._

_Once more, to save the entire base the buzzing agony of being forced to look through 'acid etching' designs just so Bumblebee could attack them over their half-Sparked choices, Sari stepped in with a solution. Their budding rebel would 'start small', assisted by his fleshy cohort, and decide if he even liked permanent statements (which was beyond doubtful). They would move on from there._

"_Sure as circuitry, then," Bumblebee promised her, grinning his cocky grin. The two sat on the concrete couch, Sari perched on one of his legs with his clunky arm across her thimble lap, stinger out but offline. Sari hunched over it, an exacto-knife angled in her fist. "We don't have neural circuitry in carbonite components—that'd be ridiculous."_

"_Yeah. Way ridiculous," smirking Sari snorted, wry tongue inching out as she added another screeching line to the glass of Bumblebee's stinger with the thin blade. _

_When she finished (with many a puff and flair and showman's twirl), Bumblebee's pert face almost fell at the carefully scratched heart, not even fully centered in the middle carbonite component of his left stinger. His geometry-blessed vision deigned it a little too fat, a little too lurchingly a-symmetrical (not considering the trying angle of Sari's soft arm or her doting concentration or her _love_, all observed by Prowl as he waited in the back of the room with a delicately ignored data-pad) and not at all fitting of a speedster demon with an ever-ready grin and the sharpest wit around. His mouth twisted. Then, right before honest bawling disaster struck (Sari breathed in, breathed in--), he caught Prowl's optic—or rather, the threatening angle of the ninjabot's visor and thin mouth, open servo trained on Sari's expectant face--and he smiled as hard as he could. So hard, in fact, that Prowl was certain he heard something crack._

"_T-thanks! A lot!" He exclaimed, and Sari utterly swelled, buoyed up to the tips of her clunky orange feet with cupcake pride. Once she was off his lap, the scout stared at the plain 'modification' for a reflective moment then swapped out his proper servos, picking up the same knife with ready spider-splayed fingers and a bright devil look. "Now—where d'you want yours?"_

"_I—uh!" Their little human backed up a scuffing step or three, waving her hands. "Wait, this doesn't go both ways! You can't carve anything into me!"_

"_Not with this… but how 'bout my servos?!"_

_He tossed the knife aside and wiggled his friendly, blunt digits, but Sari let out a piercing shriek nonetheless and began to clamor over the back of the couch, pigtails waggling madly._

"_No! No static tickling! No way, no how--please, no!"_

"_Anymore 'no's'?" Bumblebee challenged as he plucked at her tiny feet, managing to dislodge a boot before she toppled over the edge and took off running._

"_No _fair_!"_

_Protests aside, Sari squealed in face-scrunching joy when Bumblebee took to chasing her with sweeping strides—each movement masking the careful, clunking slowness he kept up with many a thrown jibe (verbal firecrackers, distractions) until she could gasp and grasp and giggle her way into her tire-swing-plastic-stereo room, wiggle into her rollerblades and begin the chase in accelerated earnest. Prowl, Bumblebee's stupidity apprehended and Sari's tender a-symmetrical heart preserved, sat back to research the Serengeti with an elusive smile on his long face._

_Even in the years to come, however, she spoke the truth: when it came time to carve the jagged Autobot crest into the shell of her sparking midnight exostructure, Sari was still the one holding the knife._

Prowl didn't know how long he stood, pistons hammering raggedly in his chassis, whole crushed world still hung on the echo of the dead cold clatter of Bumblebee's stingers. For a starless moment or a blank-walled eternity, he was alone in the red dark, then something moved behind him. Taut with terror, he spun to find Lockdown—_Lockdown_ of one-hundred stellar-cycles—standing a distance away, right on the edges of the light cage with one mismatched servo propped on a table. When Prowl, shivering in a wretched nausea, opened his mouth, Lockdown put up the servo.

"I didn't touch him."

The words and the tone—or the mech, standing with his red optics narrowed, growl resigned and careful--didn't mesh. Prowl's visor creaked back to the mods, silent save for the tortured mechanical heave of his body. He simply _looked_, rapt horror keeping him taking a shaking step back—from running, like he did so long ago. Pieces of his friend. Cold cracked carnage on Lockdown's dark shelf. Bumblebee's Spark scattered.

"I bought 'em. Black market circuit," his partner said dully, somewhere behind him. When nothing came of it but more quivering silence and Prowl didn't move from his slump over the dropped mods, Lockdown raised his vocals, dangerous feeling glinting at the bottom of the next grunt. "It wasn't me."

Prowl's processor shuddered under the weight of the black, disjointed desolation he had so often seen beyond the circle of lamps, but never touched. Now, he was swamped with pulsing black fear, singed with blue-white shock, burrowing and biting down to his creaking joints. His Spark flickered so sharply it hurt, raw at the smoky edges.

"H-how--" Prowl stuttered, cold innards locking up. His visual field was split with panicky static. "How could you?"

Who he was speaking to, he didn't know.

"Easy. It's called a purchase: when you give 'em money, they're like to give you what you want," Lockdown answered, moving back to his work chair with a series of far-away shuffles and metal scrapes. Back to his open plating, fizzling on his arm. Prowl turned around, auditory units buzzing maddeningly in his vast toothy dark.

_"First Prime's axe… next, your stingers."_

He had... bought them.

"You—"

"It was a good buy," his partner grunted back, already reaching for his blowtorch. "Those things were only seventy-ei—"

"Those _things_ were Bumblebee's!" Prowl cried, servos knotted into trembling fists; a serrated savior feeling jabbed through his petrified core, enflaming him with a hollow, desperate strength. The bounty hunter whirled with one servo on his seat, red optics blazing.

"I didn't kill your buddy, Prowl! It was somebody else: I just picked up the leftovers!" Lockdown snapped roughly, servos clenched, spiked shoulders drawn high and taut. He vented hot air in a feral half-snarl, then glared at his motionless partner over his shoulder as he turned again, hunted and low. He slammed the torch down, blow ringing in the dark and light alike. "Quit _lookin'_ at me like I'm—"

"A lawless _beast_?" Prowl hissed, taking a vengeful, shaking step forward and away from Bumblebee as something very akin to hatred—blind, seething hatred—ate him piece by sharp piece.

"And you're any better, kid?" Lockdown retorted, harshness petering into a cynical chuckle as he somehow relaxed. Ugly, jaded vindication, thick and dark as oil, coursed under his monstrous plating. "You can't say anythin'. You're just as bad as me… if bad's really the word I'd use."

His far-away partner had the nerve to leer at him, cruel and lazy. So vicious was the burn in his core and the vice in his processor—past, present, crashing against wants and one-hundred-year wishes--that Prowl stumbled, an agonized sound wrenching out of him as he thrust a servo out for support. It was denial: one hundred stellar-cycles of religious denial. He knew what he was leaving, and how it might end. He was not ignorant, but rather too informed—he knew they wouldn't stop fighting just because he left. Prowl knew they could die, but knowing the general outcome didn't permit pointless extrapolations when there was violent work to be done: he knew, but he didn't think.

He never gave himself a chance to _imagine_, or else he may have run back too late to do anything but give up.

He didn't imagine Bumblebee, cracked exostructure smeared with translucent energon, dying fizzling, gasping cycles after a colossal grey fist had plunged into his chassis, clenched in and eased out with sticky snapping slowness; wires and bendy viscera splitting from the black-spattered, yellow rind of him with every inch. He didn't imagine Bee's optics fading, cracked and whole alike, hazily locked on sneering red optics just out of reach. The final wet cough, then the ghostly sound of half-burst, half-torn systems moaning to a stop.

He didn't imagine how Sari would scream.

Lockdown threw something down; slammed something else.

"You left 'em for dead, and they died. Surprised?"

Prowl shook his head, one servo clawing up his arm. It was one thing to assume—assume in vague, amorphous connotations, of general assumptions and implications at arms length and Sparks chasm because it had been so _long_—but to have the proof in his grip? A literal piece of his friend, the cold proof of his treachery--his soulessness? It was a scuffed remnant _purchased_ by the one mech he had to turn to for everything in life, even though he never should have begun to turn.

Never should have begun to trust, because nothing was sacred to Lockdown. Nothing.

Prowl had abandoned them. Who was left? Slow, fizzling Ratchet was gone, he had to be, but Optimus--was he online? Their once-warm leader, back on Cybertron and shunning the public, barricaded in whatever dark would keep him from their unwanted praise—acid on exposed wires, mockery of the morbid truth of heroism: that being the sole returning warrior meant that others had been left to die—but unable to run from his own memory core? And Sari—_Sari. _Prowl scratched at his glossy chest plating.

Bare.

"They been up against Megatron for ages: you really think you could've made a difference?" Lockdown rasped, pausing a moment to distill a vinegary snort. "Pit, if it weren't for me, you'd 'probly be warming a shelf somewhere, kid. You're sharp: those flunkies didn't know when to jump ship, and that's what it got 'em. A eulogy and a mouthful of lead."

It didn't matter that their war had been won: those on Earth never lived to see their own blood-born sunrise.

"Thing is, heroes don't get to stick around long enough to see their own pretty monuments. Heroes are chumps."

Prowl looked up to see Lockdown smirking at him, wicked features quirked in some ugly, smoldering distortion of pride.

"You ain't a hero, Prowl. Y'never were," he chuckled. "You like livin' too much. Good thing you were able t'turn yourself around before it got you off-lined."

In one back-shelf moment, a century's worth of carefully cultured façade crumpled. Prowl's distractions—the slowly warming ship, Lockdown's servos around his waist, the selfish blush and bloom of a job well-done only to send a possibly innocent unknown into the clutches of an enemy—shattered, and the shards snapped inwards and gouged at his Spark. What pulsed free from the wounded star was scorching hatred: hatred for himself, for evading the truth for so long, his whole floorless world a product of his own repulsive egotism; hatred for the life he had allowed himself to lead while his friends perished.

Hatred for Lockdown, who had stolen him and let _them_ die without him.

Small and unbearably heavy in the dark, Prowl clattered to his knees. Lockdown, almost hunched at his table again, turned around then straightened, engine revving and dying in one abrupt, vexed lurch.

"Get up," his partner snorted at him, vocals soaked with sneering force—palpable contempt for sheltering ties of friendship and loyalty and the chasms they left when snapped. Such ties should have been one hundred stellar-cycles in the grave--from the moment they _committed_ and the shivering Autobot went preternaturally still in the cuffs and gave his past away with a single word, and Lockdown crushed the whispered offering with his gapped teeth--but it was not so. Prowl remained on the floor, substructure throbbing with an sick, slick pressure bleeding from his Spark, one servo hovering above the stingers. The only sign of how many more stellar-cycles of caged, mad struggle?

Somewhere in the distance, Lockdown set down what he was holding: all Prowl heard was a clank and a deadly silence.

"Get _up_," he repeated, glaring at Prowl crouched in the dark, silent and ponderous and echoing. Something dark and bitter reared up in his tense chassis—it siphoned down his wiry arms, making his mismatched servos snap into fists. The ninjabot didn't move. Lockdown snarled, shoving a bench to the side to stride over to Prowl's crumpled form, one servo digging into the ninjabot's arm and hauling him upwards.

"I said _get up_, y'little slagger!"

Prowl reacted in a wrenching red convulsion of limbs—he dug in and tore away, slamming Lockdown across the face and burying a knee into his green-striped middle, then thrusting himself away. The bounty hunter dropped to one knee with a tight grunt, servos closing on air. Prowl stumbled, and kept stumbling, crashing into a modshelf and spilling three crowded tiers onto the floor; the brutal, cold cacophony seemed to knock something loose in his swamped processor. Gasping, he curled, hooked servos tearing at himself with a horrified doggedness, raking across the blank spot on his front. Searching, searching.

Nothing. There was nothing left; nothing to tear at, save for the heavy, beautiful mods he had used to cover his shame. He had given himself away, given his very Spark away for silent space succor in the face of the one battle that mattered.

Finally, before the last of the strewn mods and their dead owners could echo away, he screamed. He screamed and destroyed himself in rending scrabbling scratches, crunching and ripping the precious gold-lined modifications from his body. His hooked hands sent them slamming to the floor, every exposed neural circuit alight with self-hatred, until Lockdown, stiffened by the blistering, unnatural howl, reached for him again. Whether it was to subdue him or strike him, neither knew, but Prowl's visor widened from its anguished sliver: he jerked back, one arm angled high across his front.

"Away," he hissed raggedly, visor flickering with the throb and shudder of his wild, helpless rage. Prowl stilled, clenched body belying the desperate, messy whirr of his scalding processor, but finally managed to look his partner in the face--and froze Lockdown with the accusatory stare of one whose life—or noble death--had been stolen from them. Tricked from under their Spark, sliced off their front by the servos of a fiend. Prowl drew back, crumbling into a wounded slump as Lockdown clutched his dented abdomen, staring at his crushed animal of a partner.

"Get _away_."

Prowl servos slipped up and enveloped his fizzling temples, body shaking from head to pede, then he took one last tremulous look at Lockdown and ran. Turned tail and sprinted out of the shop, heavy footfalls banging and echoing. Dragging himself to a standing position, Lockdown coughed, jabbing a digit at the gaping door.

"I didn't steal you in the night, kid!" He roared, pain mixing with a fury so new he had to swallow against a swell of acrid oil, entire body knotting up. "You came of your own free will! You—"

The shop gave his rage back to him in auditory after-images, red electric scrawls of sound, but it was empty. The ship was empty; Prowl had run. Engine screeching, Lockdown aspirated quickly then slammed his fist into his extraction table with a beastly roar. Visual field narrowed to little more than smears of color, chassis bursting, he lashed out, servos hooking on anything that would make noise; flinging tools to the floor with a fierce swipe of his arm before sending a bench flying into the wall, knocking down a new clanging waterfall of bodyparts. The shop took his blows, then echoed to neutral nothingness again, leaving him panting and snarling in the middle of it.

Finally, his digits uncurled from the wrench he'd been holding, and the clatter woke him. He glared at the door for a cycle more, a suffocating maelstrom of _scrap_ nearly forcing his innards—and cold, smashed Spark--into excruciating arrest. Lockdown kicked at the wrench, then stalked over to his table again, grabbing for scattered tools to stop the piteous sparking of his open arm.

"You'll get over it," he snarled to the dark, peeling away insulation and hot wiring in his silent, half-lit shop. "We got all the time in the world, kid. All the time in the world."

The slow, rote smirk never reached his thinned red optics, nor his hissing Spark, but petrified on his white face as a ghastly grave-marker for a mistake he never should have made—because Prowl was never supposed to find them. At least, not anymore.


	21. Change

A/N: If you thought this was going to be a glitch to write… well, you'd be more than right! However, I want to specifically thank StarShineMB and Kaekokat (and yoyopron for her _thoughts_, and, as always, Enolove!), who literally saved me from an awkward, backhanded, _really _sloppy resolution: your in-depth musings helped me see another side and sort their convoluted crap out.

Thank you, I LOVE YOU. Thanks again for all your reviews, guys: and hey, _you_ could end up saving the next chapter, or spawning a new one! Enjoy!

* * *

Change

* * *

Even if Lockdown gave the other mech a thousand stellar-cycles, he doubted Prowl would ever forgive him on his own.

The first two weeks, young mech could not be roused from his own mire, incapacitated by the crushing hatred he was too deserving of to fight. His door was locked; he didn't see the light of the stars for at least twelve solar-cycles. The ship was dead without Lockdown's small, silent partner wandering around, but the other mech had intelligence (and rage, and frustration) enough to leave Prowl to boil in his own damn fluids for as long as he pleased. Primus only knew how he was dealing with the warped metal and exposed wiring his little _fit_ had left him with. Energon cubes kept vanishing, albeit at an unnervingly low rate, so at least he knew the kid was keeping himself online--even as he attempted to strangle his reduced Spark into silence with a burning, histrionic vice of guilt and one-hundred-year-old betrayal.

It was amazing that Prowl didn't just leave, _run_, but the fact remained that he had no one to run to. This was all there was. And honestly, Lockdown could deal with Prowl having it out with himself. It meant the problem was contained and would be solved by the person who started it; all he had to do was wait, with no intervention in sight, because this had been a century in coming.

He knew Prowl. From the beginning, he knew the kid had that nagging, deathless glitch called a _conscience_; that one fine solar-cycle, sooner rather than later, he would have the stupidity to look past the overwhelming pros of his decision—he was online, he was physically sated, he had security and a fine job and good times aplenty—and start dwelling on what and who he had left behind. Lockdown could have labeled it for him: he left behind the guarantee of a gutted Sparkchamber, plain and simple. For the kid, however, there was more to it than that. Lockdown couldn't comprehend it (he had no ties or allegiances to mourn and the present blotted out the dry past with its luscious, scraping proximity, always, _always_) but he knew that those thoughts and the _facts_ would take Prowl someplace ugly one day, and here he was.

But as the weeks dragged on, it became obvious that Prowl was making the switch to the superficial root of the problem: exhausted with abusing himself (or with nothing left to tear at, his cracked mods already piled in a corner by his grimacing partner), the clever, battered little ninjabot started to think on the fact that his little friend's stingers had been bought by somebody, and there was someone to blame here—in more ways than one. After all, he had to point a finger at somebody. Anyone. Just like every other moment of their closed-quarter lives, Lockdown was the only one nearby… who just so happened to deal in mods and trophies torn off of online and offline 'bots alike—including those that might have belonged to a little yellow scout once upon a time.

Prowl should have been over those rejects anyways, but he wasn't. It was _idiotic._ It wasn't as though Lockdown had hurt the little slagger—there was nothing wrong with making a purchase. Nothing. He'd defend that 'till the day his Spark flickered out. It was his way and it had always been his way, and Prowl keening and kicking around wasn't going to change that.

More importantly, this Autobot-Earth-War circus was _not his problem_—but it was, somehow, when running into Prowl in a hallway could cause his own sturdy alien innards to lock up. After two weeks of cloistered nonexistence, the ninjabot appeared in the junction between their rooms like a creaking hallucination. He stared balefully at his non-partner, never speaking, but radiating a direct loathing so intense that spiked, juggernaut Lockdown had to step aside. Let him pass. When his bulky motor attempted to rev, to bring any sort of offensive heat and motivation back to him—his normal unconditional aggressiveness, first and last resort--it puttered into silence and he just sneered as Prowl stalked by. He might strike a wall afterward, but in the face of his partner's mounting hatred, he could do nothing but rage after the fact.

Prowl had chosen to come with him. Lockdown, his partner not his _kidnapper_, didn't owe him a damned thing.

No, it wasn't his problem, but as much as he hated to confront it—to admit it was there by honoring it with a confrontation—this wasn't part of the deal they struck on that monumental day. He didn't agree to _this_: to Prowl moping and nursing wounds and surely going insane in his room, to a partner who wasn't a partner. Prowl didn't speak to him for another two weeks or 336 megacycles or 20,160 cycles even after that initial seclusion, airless abyss left from barbed non-interaction crushing in, all in a red metal box so small they couldn't even avoid each other. Lockdown took jobs alone just to get away from the insane asylum that was his ship, always grimacing and growling when they asked where his pretty partner was.

Try as he would, however, he couldn't run from his own ship, and Prowl wasn't going to forgive him (and restore Primus-damned equilibrium) on his own. Not without a fight, apparently, and this creeping non-battle was more exhausting than a confrontation. This dull conclusion found him striding into his tiny hangar with an olive-enameled slab of metal clenched in his fist, Spark already condensing and twitching fitfully as he made for Prowl's silhouette, knotted against the far wall.

The contraption was something to get the kid to talk to him, because he either left the room immediately or the silence, once imbedded in the void between them, was impossible to breach with words or blows. Perhaps it was stereotypical of Lockdown to rely on his precious credits in such a situation, but it was the only resource he had—and it still felt staggeringly insufficient as he stopped in front of the bench and tossed the glossy new data-pad into Prowl's lap.

It clanged. Prowl stilled at the intrusion, his preternatural, aching silence broken. It shouldn't have been much of a difference, as all the ninjabot had done for weeks was sit and stare, but Lockdown heard the stiff quiet sink to the other's core. No answer, no response: just that immovable visor, that low-set mouth.

"Old one's a piece of junk," Lockdown muttered, already too irritated to trust himself with more words. Prowl looked down at the foreign object, then up at his partner.

"I don't accept," Prowl said coldly, his first words in weeks coinciding with a soft scrape as he picked up the data-pad and held it out in front of him. The simple, horribly dull, horribly _ready_ affront applied hot flint to his month-long boiling frustration, sparks erupting faster than he could have reckoned; Lockdown snatched the data-pad back and nearly crushed it in his massive green claw-modification.

"I'll make you accept!" He fumed, flicking it in front of the ninjabot's blank face. "Y'know how much this co—"

Prowl ignored him. His pretty face—suddenly not so pretty, drained by the subdued fizzle of his gashed arms and thighs and thrusters—was turned stiffly to the side, staring off into the corners of the cramped little hangar, even with his inches-away partner bearing down on him. Perfect detachment. The sight and the unyielding chill made Lockdown a little crazy: he flung the pad onto the bench, cramming the freed servo to his forehead. Finally, he snapped like a piece of carbonite.

"I'm sorry!" He hissed spitefully, wide mouth warping around the unholy word. "Alright? I'm _sorry_."

Unmoved, not even gifted with so much as a flicker of that maddeningly blank blue, Prowl's visor thinned.

"I do not accept your apology."

The tone, monotone and biting, said it all: Lockdown nearly stalled from simple shock, half from the fact that Prowl _known_ to refuse the gift—the combination of the gift and the implied apology—because Lockdown would have backed off and never said a word if Prowl had understood the motion and began to forgive him a little. But now he'd said it outright, and still Prowl was as icy as Nephron. Relentless, impossible. Lockdown bit down, grasping at straws: kid had turned down his best offer, words he hadn't said in _millennia_. A spurt of genuine anxiety burned his insides, then soured and curdled into frustrated anger.

"What do you want from me?" He growled, bulky claw out, matte finish failing to gleam in the red lights of the hangar.

"I want you to leave," Prowl murmured.

His long face was still turned away, unknowing and uncaring of the gall in that simple sentence—ordering the other mech around in his own ship. Lockdown would have given him just about anything he wanted, except that. The huge mech vented some warm air, red optics dulling to chips of blood ruby in his shadowed face as he looked his small partner over. Prowl's lithe figure (exostructure warped into sharp-lipped mouths where the mods had been ripped free) was strange and diminutive, stripped of the angular, bulky weapons that so fleshed him out for one hundred stellar-cycles: he didn't seem lushly powerful anymore, but rather torn down to his bare essentials. He radiated a stark willfulness that set Lockdown's gears on edge.

The bounty hunter had no plan, but he knew that this was damage control. Had to deal with Prowl before he succeeded in taking himself out.

"Listen. Prowl." He knew better than to touch the other mech, but he still stepped closer, regular servo clenching at the back of his thick neck. Exhausted. "Y'gotta get patched."

"Let the wounds take their toll," he said, murmur laced with hushed, hateful static as his servos tightened into fists. "I deserve every moment of this."

That was just too much.

"Would you shift up and deal?!" Lockdown snapped, harsh vocals ringing in the closed space. Glaring, he jerked away to scrape at the air, bursting with curtailed malice and seething frustration. "This, all'a this scrap--you're overdue, kid! It doesn't even _matter_ anymore! Those stingers, I bought 'em a long time ago. Eighty slaggin' stellar-cycles or more!"

Finally, Prowl _reacted_—but it was only to flinch and stir and look hurt that Bumblebee had perished so soon after he left.

"You've had them all this time?" He whispered after a snatch of silence. The sound of his vocals—soft, real--made all of the heat drain from Lockdown's chassis in one sudden slurp. For reasons clear and unclear alike, it wasn't his place to make this worse. Damage control.

"Yeah," he muttered. He straightened and crossed his arms and paused, not knowing what else to do. "That was before you'd settled in."

The way he said it made it seem deeper, and it was. However the stingers had made their way from Earth to the circuit, Lockdown had known full-well what he was buying; knew full-well that, as practical as he was, he could not plead innocence and there was a point to that--Prowl caught it. The ugly realization fell upon him and made every cold neural circuit contract in a chain of vicious pinpricks.

"You wanted me to find them," he hissed, suddenly alight with fresh rage, because Lockdown had been and still was a manipulative bastard with a calculated grasp of practical cruelty. He'd bought the mods to make sure that Prowl—anonymous, punky kid Prowl who strode in and out of his ship with his chin high and his mouth shut tight and looked like he was going to be hard to tame—would know his place. Faced with such a dangerous response, the bounty hunter was going to protest, but he never protested—or, the Lockdown that existed before Prowl had never done it. Instead, he shook his head and told the truth.

"Yeah. I did," he said heavily, more heavily than he ever remembered. The bounty hunter looked up, searching the other mech's face. "Like I said, that was before you'd… settled in."

Before he knew that Prowl was with him—would stay with him, every slow moment and every quick disagreement, for better and worse--because he wanted to be. When he spoke again, his gravelly vocals were almost miserable.

"Past that, I forgot to toss 'em."

"Why?"

Why, in the first place—why now. Or just 'why?'

"You needed t'know," Lockdown answered, crossing his arms again. He tried to keep it simple, because he'd already stupidly snarled the nastier details. Prowl… needed to know. That much was fact.

"Not like this," Prowl whispered, stricken. The weakness in his vocals disturbed the other mech—it seemed too early in the crash for such non-anger, such surrender, but Prowl was not Lockdown. The bristling, distracting anger was gone, decayed into stagnant misery: he asked simply to ask, confronted once again with the knowledge that Lockdown wasn't _to blame_ for any of his pain. He'd just revealed it: the responsibility lay with himself, and his last excuse had fallen through.

To Lockdown, that weakness was an alarming sign of surrender. A deep, frightening surrender—to conditions, to the past. Prowl wasn't going to fight to get out of it.

"Would you quit? You couldn't have done anything. You would'a been doused and stripped for spare parts like the scout!"

"His name was Bumblebee," Prowl snapped, lip-plating curling. The flash of chill—and Prowl's dangerously angled visor--made Lockdown back off, tone down… and try again.

"Fine, then. Bumblebee."

He spat the name as softly as he could—it sounded horrible in his rough vocals, all mistakes and fat syllables. If only the obnoxious little mech hadn't existed; if only he hadn't been so keen on those stingers.

"You couldn't have done anything, you can't do anything and you won't be able to do a single slaggin' thing. That scrap is eighty stellar-cycles in the ground," Lockdown insisted roughly, words prying and pushing at Prowl's motionless form. "You did what you did, and now you're here and that's it. That's all you've got, kid. S'all anyone's got."

Prowl seemed to think about it for a moment, but it never sunk through his cracked exostructure: his self-hatred had accumulated on his glossy plating like rancid fat, refusing intrusion, swabbing up and spitting out any helping phrase. His processor was set, humming a dooming note. His visor dimmed alarmingly.

"You bought them… so that I would find them," Prowl said again, revisiting the insidious idea with a careful, hazy air, truly facing the bounty hunter for the first time. Lockdown churned and tightened under that direct stare—it demanded truth, when coupled with Prowl's slump and muted, hidden blue optics. So he said it.

"I bought 'em so you wouldn't run off," Lockdown admitted dully, red optics trained on something beyond Prowl.

It took a moment to sink in, then Prowl began to shudder under the idea, the plain-faced exploitation of this Sparkless mech: according to plan, Prowl knew there was no going back. Lockdown would have let him drown in the horrible realization of _what he'd done_ but be assured his new business investment wasn't going to run off on him in the middle of the night, because a lack of options did wonders for a bot's dedication. Bumblebee's fragments were _insurance_. The injured mech almost struggled to his pedes, compact engine snarling desperately, but Lockdown stayed him with his precise, clutching claw and tight vocals.

"So you'd know… there wasn't a damn thing to go back to."

That's all it was, in the end: a measure of protection. Hard, cruel, painful protection.

Anybody else, Lockdown would have let satisfy their own curiosity--go back to Earth. Smell the oil, see the carnage. It was on their head if they wanted to pry into what they'd left. But Prowl… it was better to give him a parceled sign that the world he knew was truly gone—a symbol, a snatch of song—rather than let him stumble into the bones of the full story.

He knew that if Prowl ever went back to Earth, there was more than a good chance that he was never coming back… not because there was anything to go back to but because of what was left. Grey, dusty horror; hope-sapped ash silhouettes of those he had treasured and _what_ he had treasured. Strength, faith, loyalty. Somehow, seeing that, Prowl would fade. Die. It was an ugly life and an ugly truth when he faced it, but Prowl still wasn't offline. Beyond that, Earth would break his ability to live this selfish life with Lockdown: it would break that sense of suspended reality that Lockdown's own chewy, concrete reality supplemented, affirmed, engulfed. Nurtured.

As time went on and on and on, he'd do near to (silent, inconspicuous) anything to keep Prowl from going back to Earth.

In the beginning, when he didn't care so much about the kid—before he actually wanted Prowl happy, and not just because he was easier to deal with when that long face was soft with a half-smile—he would've put the stingers on himself. Lockdown would've pounded the message into him with the scraping click of the mod swap and his nasty grin in the resulting phosphorescence; broken the kid himself, just to make sure the job was done right. But as time went on, he forgot about them. He forgot about the planned effrontery, the expertly executed crises of faith he was going to smack his partner into line with. Out of sight, out of mind—and then Prowl _wanted_ to stay with him.

Then silent, smirking Prowl came back to him, again and again.

It—Earth, truth, the impending disillusionment--wasn't an issue anymore so long as everything went smoothly (and how silky smooth it went, with traded smiles and warm Sparkchambers, something disturbingly large fleshing out the space between them for one-hundred salty stellar-cycles). The stingers faded to the background… until the kid found them, and caught Lockdown in an old plan. Surely the broken 'bot didn't notice how the usually unflappable bounty hunter had stiffened when he saw the shapes at Prowl's pedes, processor stalling then racing madly. It was uncertain when the shift had happened, but Lockdown no longer wanted Prowl to find them. No longer wanted him… hurt.

It was more than uncomfortable, knowing he wanted to shelter the kid, much less from his own deeds. Crystalline rationale made him believe that Prowl couldn't be angry at him for their team to work. Something beyond rationale told him he seriously didn't want Prowl angry at him; that he hated the idea of the kid hating him—or himself. The self-absorbed, exacting, free-willed hunter had a weakness, now: one that rode on the Spark and whims of another being.

Objectivity was no longer an option. Hadn't been since freshly-patchd Prowl grabbed his hand and sunk into recharge on his table and Lockdown realized the true meaning of loss—the stark screech it made as it scraped by his Spark in a chilling near miss. Everything else in his life, he'd made sure was replaceable and appropriately priced, then _he_ came along. Prowl was his one weakness, but that only meant he had to keep the kid close so no one else could get to him.

"You gotta know where you are. I showed you," Lockdown muttered.

When Prowl didn't answer, chased back to his seat on the bench by his partner's words (silently fighting to compromise them with his own knowledge and pain), Lockdown made his first honest move and sat down beside the little mech. The booming sound of it seemed to seal something—perhaps that the bounty hunter wasn't leaving anytime soon.

"Y'gonna hold it against me 'till we're dust?"

Lockdown said it, even though he knew it wasn't about him anymore: he'd cleared his side of the ring, leaving Prowl… alone with himself. His decisions, past. The rest was up to the kid. Carefully, Lockdown reached out and took Prowl's thin black wrist, not even closing his thorny digits. Prowl didn't draw away, but there was a difference between pliability and agonizing listlessness: one held in the injured flicker of a visor and a blank face, turned toward the sinewy mess bulging out of his mutilated forearms. Lockdown could see that his maintenance systems had spent the last few weeks coating the exposed wiring with polymers, keeping them from the open air—good, but not good enough.

After a few more cycles of silence, Prowl actually looked up at him with a vapid slowness, no longer able to see any enemy but himself. His hidden optics searched Lockdown's stony face.

"I left them to die," he whispered for the very first time. The words branded him, not departing with the trembling vessel of his vocals but given leave to burn, cutting and unencumbered, through his unprotected insides.

"Whatever you say," Lockdown grunted, as though he'd call the cold, factual act by a different name. He jerked his thorny shoulders, inspecting the wounds in the red light. "I can't fix your problems, kid. That's on your head."

That seemed to rouse the young mech: he shook his head, visor angling slightly as his maddeningly unfocused hum condensed.

"You speak as though this does not touch you. I betrayed my team for my own means—and now I am your _partner_," Prowl half-sneered the word, as though it nauseated and frightened him. Undeserving of function in the first place, he had been let close to another being, traitorous Spark still hissing brightly--the possibility for betrayal loomed again. "What vanity causes you to think I will not do the same to you one day?"

"'Cos I won't let you, fer Sparks' sake," Lockdown snapped, heaving himself from the bench with a flinty gleam in his narrowed optics, brittle patience deteriorated into a gory smear. Prowl aspirated sharply as his partner turned and jabbed a digit into his face. "I chose you for a reason. Odds are in my favor: most 'bots only got one good, girder-rattlin' betrayal in 'em, and you already spent yours to save your life from a fenced-in massacre—somethin' you couldn't pay me to wail about. All that's shown me is that you got a good processor underneath all that scrap, so moan and whine all you want—take a fraggin' decade or three to swallow it down—but if you're really gonna give up on this, I'm gonna fight you every step of the way."

Prowl stared up at him, caught in a wordless, airless paralysis as Lockdown retreated a few strides into the darkness of the hangar like a burnt animal, servos clenched tightly. He paced for a moment, then jerked around to stare at his motionless partner, engine gunning low and dangerous. The bounty hunter's fuming indecision—whether to stalk off or stay and glare, infused with his own raging, prickling discomfort for being goaded into _speaking_—seeped across their gap like a heat-wave, finally drawing a single word from Prowl.

"Why?" he murmured, Spark quivering. Why would Lockdown waste such energy on him?

Because, even as the huge, snarling mech valued selfishness and calculating malice—even as he couldn't and would never understand the Prowl's pain and situation--he saw something greater in the ninjabot: a precious, hundred-year, irreplacable something he would personally fight to preserve.

"Like you said, you're my partner," the bounty hunter muttered roughly from his shadows, looking to the side. "It's in the contract."

Somehow, Spark feeling as though it had squeezed and phased through his heavy chestplating to leave an echoing, half-lit space in his center, Prowl's young, numb mouth twitched into an impossible half-smile. Moments more passed before he realized he was trembling down his girders, overcome; by that time, Lockdown had seen the look on his face and accepted it with a slow snort of air, vaulting his own lingering discomfort with a ragged, irritated shake of his head.

"Now start gettin' over it—I'm gonna get your mods. You won't last three kliks without 'em and you're startin' to fraggin' spark again."

He stalked out of the hangar, the bit of disgust he managed widening Prowl's smile as the younger mech stared into the gashes in his legs, feeling both centered and numbly scattered to all corners of the stars. Because... that was it.

There was nothing left to do but _last_. Live. Live, and forgive himself for something he could not help. It was lamentable—it would always be. The important thing was that he had Spark left to feel it in its eternity and entirety; to honor and love and ask forgiveness by living right in whatever small, solid way he could. To _know_. The victory of his faction meant little against the loss of the once-warm 'bots Prowl knew, and it was his personal burden to carry through his life, but at least the universe was at peace for a moment.

Perhaps Prowl could follow suit, with Lockdown at his back. Caring in whatever cockeyed, gruff way he could. Tools at ready to patch him when he needed it most. Ready… to fight for him.

When his partner returned a handful of cycles later, a roll of tools under his arm, Prowl silently proffered any limb Lockdown grunted for. His partner worked away on him, leading Prowl onto his pedes while he took up the bench and re-shaped and pressed and melted and picked at wires and metal alike, healing to the constant hum of the local EM field. Prowl stilled under the complex attention, feeling a tattered part of himself located far deeper than his jagged plating settle and press back into place as every comforting concrete modification gave him weight and substance; Lockdown never made visual contact, but his touch lacked his usual brusque pinch and jerk.

The bounty hunter, consumed as he was, was trying to be kind to him. The possibility was further affirmed when a yank-triggered stumble brought Prowl inbetween Lockdown's wiry legs and Prowl didn't realize he had groped for his partner (impulsively clawing for an end to a month of burning, cold-room solitude with physical comfort) until he was pressed against the huge mech, arms wrapped desperately around his thick-plated neck. Pistons hammering, Prowl froze for fifteen long, creaking kliks, not daring to aspirate until Lockdown's massive servo clanked onto his upper back and simply rested there.

Prowl took his overwhelmed comfort from his partner for a few precious cycles, letting all the empty-air nausea and crushing loneliness clear from his tortured body; Lockdown sat in that reluctant, stiff space between letting it be extracted and actually giving it, optics offlined. He didn't look at Prowl when the ninjabot drew away, still shaking slightly, and simply moved to clean the mess up. Still, he had to glance up when his patched and decked-out partner retreated to his bench again only to stare at him for cycles on end with a strange, intent expression, pretty face once more framed by his slick helmet.

"What?" He huffed, gathering his tools with quick, curt snatches.

"A real apology," Prowl murmured after a moment, memory core drifting back as his servos found the complex, forgotten data-pad and lifted it into his lap. He smiled at Lockdown, and, wan as it was, the bounty hunter's tortured insides finally wound down. "You are learning."

Lockdown snorted, wide mouth curling.

"Don't say scrap like that. I'm too old to be learnin' anything new: you're stuck with me just the way I am, kid," he growled, lumbering away with his tools and his swaggering pride. Prowl's Spark clenched in a glistening mixture of exhaustion, sorrow and hope as he curled onto the bench, restored in all of his parts, and pressed the data-pad—the truly nice data-pad—to his chassis. He bowed his head.

"If only you knew how much you have changed," he said softly.

Old mechs could learn new tricks—even the delicate art of staying still while Prowl buried the buffed stingers in the wet soil of a beautiful, unknown planet. He had no words, because there was no one left to hear them. Instead, the former Autobot tucked a flower's crisp roots right above them, so they hugged the gleaming curve of the piece of his friend… all in the hopes that life would go on, and his friends would want it this way.

After all, they fought for peace.


	22. Picturesque

A/N: It's all gonna be okay :D

* * *

Picturesque

* * *

It would have been a nice story.

After the first century living and aspirating and bickering with the strange little mech he plucked from Earth, Lockdown tired of his fits. He was a beastly, solitary creature at best: talented and efficient, but socially inept. Not at all suited for the scalding crucible that was cohabitation—especially when it involved surrendering parts of his beloved equipment and his ship-space and his _control_. The seasoned mech was incapable of faking emotions, which, of course, was the core component of a happy plastic coexistence.

It wasn't long before Prowl began to get under his heels and the bounty hunter was forced to face the fact that his favorite fortune was not at all increased with this pretty black-plated investment, but diminished. The rash fifty-fifty split of legend had left him crippled. The brat didn't even have the intelligence to _use_ the money that Lockdown gave up so painfully: he let it sit, an expression of 'simplicity' and an insult to the ancient mech's offer, as he took advantage of Lockdown's aberrant generosity in every other way.

Their earlier farce of a personable liaison was generated, surely, by the novelty of sentient company—something which inevitably lost its glutinous shine after the first few starry decades. No, after that, it was all aborted fistfights and silent, cutthroat rebellion from Lockdown's pretty pet. Squabbles, power plays, disobedience. Of course, the scrambled youngling could hardly be blamed for his pouts and clouts. The two were incompatible through the mere fact that crusty Lockdown was forcibly incompatible with anyone. Sad, but true. Doomed from the start.

Forcibly incompatible, however, was certainly the way to be for a business like his. It lessened any potential… liabilities.

Lockdown, a wise mech, was glad to learn from his flirtation with the leech of full-time commitment: once able to sit back and admire his mistakes from a distance (the specific 27,042,756-league distance from the planet of Maka, where he had genially shoved the ninjabot off his ship with nothing more than a compact communicator), he saw the myriad of inconveniences Prowl had caused him. Jobs lost, professional relations (such as the one to the solicitous and gorgeously-connected Swindle) strained, reputation tarnished, streetwise (a)morals compromised—and all for an Autobot deserter boasting little more than some Circuit-su chicanery and a sharp vocal-chip.

Yes, the slim, coy creature was probably enjoyable in other ways, and Primus forbid if Lockdown wasn't susceptible to (even blinded by) the joys of physical extravagance, but the gross impact on his business was lamentable. With a few lusciously solitary stellar-cycles to gloss the whole upset over, as far as Lockdown was concerned he had hired on not a partner but an exotic full-time pleasure model who kept him just content enough not to face the cost of the bot's keep.

Now, it was over.

Lockdown was back at his business as he had always meant to be, brutal and professional and trustworthy and eternally for hire. Not personally trustworthy, mind, but trustworthy in his selfishness: deliciously predictable, always objective. He drove onwards, properly warned off of any sticky relationship lasting longer than a curt transaction: namely, a proposal, a task and a transfer of payment. There was no possibility of manipulation, no squirming personal compromise of hallowed impersonal values or… _reconsiderations_. Half-ashamed of his deleterious dalliance with one immature, finagling little 'bot, no matter the well-crafted angles of his creamy aft, the bounty hunter was once more truly neutral, and once more truly lovely to work with: redeemed.

Back to the crushing, lucrative, _isolated_ way of life he was crafted for. No regrets.

It would have been, Swindle mourned in his tactfully exasperated way, a nice story, but it was never to be: especially when he saw the look on Lockdown's roguish face after he leaned back from an indecorous, sloppy (and obviously stolen) face-suck with his infuriated partner. Not only that, the outrageous display of _fondness_ was coupled with an easy servo around Prowl's hip—all before the little Autobot pegged him across the face and stomped off, of course, and even _that_ prompted a disgusting expression. One, in fact, that caused Swindle to terminate the fresh comm-call with a pitifully nauseated noise and retreat to his berth for a curt half-megacycle of mourning. No, things had taken a turn for the worse with his compadre—the unspeakable, irreversible worse. Though they would grit through a transaction or seventy-three, and the mech's results would probably _technically_ be just as clean as ever, Swindle was never going to get his chummy old pal back.

The damage—Pit, the mech himself--was irreparable.


	23. Talent

A/N: PREMATURE OVERLOAD! Hehe. You'd think it would be Lockdown, but no… Kekehehe. He's had millions of years to get this down. Have the feeling this is _slightly_ OOC, but they can be playful with each other… right? Right? :fretfret:

This is for Enolianslave, as per her request! KISSES. Love you baby!

Happy (late) Thanksgiving, kids! Two this week, in the spirit of giving :3 Enjoy.

* * *

Talent

* * *

Visual art as humans would know it, or art as Bulkhead grew to love, did not exist on Cybertron. Other modes of personal expression existed among their kind, but 'artistic interpretation'—the reevaluation of a concrete scene according to one's personal preferences and viewpoints, usually executed with a significant understanding in mind--was a messy organic concept rarely touched upon by such logical beings. Their beauty lay in the crystalline mechanical-physical realm, alongside the accepted inequalities between models: the variety of their race was something to be treasured, and their champions lauded.

Singing, for instance, was a funny thing for Cybertronians. Some mechs or femmes existed whose vocals were particularly suited for melody, much as others' bodies or processors were suited for espionage, but beyond that one (subjective) distinction, all Cybertronians possessed the basic capability of carrying a tune. It was a mathematical endeavor, after all, and they were built on algorithms. 'Singing', in this way, was merely an expansion of their basic vocal functions, capable of being moderately pleasurable to mechanical beings that functioned off of stimulating, nearly tangible soundwaves and vibrations, but as Cybertronians were incapable of 'hitting a bad note' unless their coding was off, it was a fairly mediocre ability.

Prowl had never cared much for it. Music, of course; singing, not particularly. He began to see it as an art form (instead of a default ability) when attending an opera, perched in a balcony box specifically cleared for a '(Very Large) Hero of Detroit'. Madame Butterfly was hopelessly tragic, but he began to feel something more for this… artistic exhibition, beyond an interest in plot and execution. Perhaps it was the sweet reverence that the song-struck, glittering humans placed on the unique _talent_ that made him smile while absorbing the reclining female's throaty warble. Few things stimulated his curiosity like the silky joint veneration of an entire population, all political, cultural or social differences dissolved in the universal language of melody and _rapture_, but he had never been able to apply the concept of 'appreciating' it to his own kind.

That is, until he heard Lockdown.

It was ridiculous, of course. The concept. It wasn't even that the bounty hunter was exceptional: _exceptional_ hardly applied when the standards were thoughtlessly high and there was no contrast. Technically, Lockdown could sing just as well as any other mech--even Prowl himself if he should try--but his vocals made all the difference in the world.

Prowl could feel Lockdown's gritty vocals down to his girders. His lazy musical efforts were more a rumbling, climbing, dipping, gripping vibration-massage than a series of notes, and Prowl only roused himself from that sandpaper sound-bath when Lockdown broke from humming to slur a few lyrics that he either liked or happened to remember, powerful body heaving up to hack or slash a piece scrap in two, brother chainsaw braying an accompaniment, then retreat into concentrated repose for a fine adjustment. Still the non-tune carried on, warm and gravelly and powerfully absent-minded. Masculine.

Lockdown preferred drinking songs or similarly inane bits of music while working in his shop, when he wasn't blasting jazz or other sharp, brassy noise from his own speakers. Nothing high-class, nothing insightful; nothing but a distraction during physical labor. Still, it held a charm that drew Prowl to it, if only because he appreciated how comfortable his partner was in his own red-lit realm, humming to himself; creating his own strong rhythm to operate in, like a liquid set of armor. Prowl… warmed, to see him so natural and confident. Even considering his newfound appreciation of song, however, it hardly seemed an excuse for Prowl to be lurking outside Lockdown's shop, listening to the strong push of the bounty hunter's tune with one servo pressed to his warm chassis in a very, very deliberate way.

There were, after all, other… facets to a mode of expression that utilized vibration as its core component.

Startled by a sudden, grinding increase in volume—the bawdy chorus of something or other—Prowl nearly nipped his own oral plating when the gritty note pulsed out from the depths of the shop. He felt a liquid shudder go up his backstruts as Lockdown drew it out then hacked it off with a corresponding clang of a tool, pleasant sensation mingled with the fine, rosy wine of utter embarrassment.

To be blunt, the entire mess revved his engines. Lockdown's deep, mangled vocals were an unprecedented lure when presented in a melody. Prowl's experiment had been somewhat involuntary (rather, a meandering collection of decisions that certainly hadn't begun as an awkward off-shoot of voyeurism) but now the ninjabot was marooned on the floor outside of his partner's shop, absently stroking his chestplating whenever a note hit him--as hit it was, a physical swat or a stroke or a penetrating punch. Prowl twitched when the hunter picked up again, Spark hiccupping over the purr of his engine.

His strange experiment—or, at least the sterile observational portion—came to a screeching halt within the next few cycles as his tense body, fed up with the buzzing cognitive stimulation and the tentative petting, took to whining for resolution. Something buttery and very close to lust (not the razor-blade variety he saw in Lockdown's wicked face, but something far more cloudy and wanting) had built up in every secret cavity, infused with red sparks by every twist and shift of his body against the wall. Besotted with the novelty of his study, Prowl only truly became aware of what was brewing in his substructure when an askance shift nearly eked a moan out of him—then he realized he was nearly steaming at the vents, energy field quailing madly. The very idea made the prudish ninjabot freeze and recoil--but when struck with a helpless, somewhat panicked urge to end the unsightly experiment before he was caught or worse, he had to stop and reconsider.

Morover, he had ask himself a painfully obvious question: if he wanted resolution, what in the universe was he still doing outside?

After all, if Lockdown knew… well, his partner would never forgive him for failing to act, he thought with a weird half-smile. It grew as he got to his pedes with a minimal amount of shivering and finally filled the doorway, still feeling a subliminal pulse of embarrassment as he saw his partner hunched in his chair, working: forcibly unaware of any scandalous activities of the last half-megacycle. Prowl watched, waiting. Lockdown had not ceased his snippet of song when he appeared, but paused to call back without a backwards glance:

"Either get in or clear out, kid—don't just _lurk_."

Prowl's silence didn't necessarily annoy him, but his middle-of-the-road observational habits did. Lockdown hated indecisiveness. In that vein, Prowl was fairly certain his partner would approve of his… resolution.

"I apologize for interrupting… but I believe a break would be opportune," the smaller mech suggested, striding into the half-lit shop. Lockdown snorted and reached for a tool or three, not noticing the slightly strained note in his partner's normally serene vocals.

"Too bad. M'in the middle of somethin'," he grunted absently, tilting the canon up to the bright light to inspect his patch job. He kept a tight grip on it, even when Prowl appeared behind him, heaved his chair around and, in one fluid motion, slid into his open lap. Thrown by the plane-shift and parted from his planned snarl by Prowl's proximity, he ended up cocking it stupidly up towards the ceiling along with his other servo. His optics glowed bright and wide as Prowl drifted up towards his chassis, halved visor blazing an intent blue.

"How to phrase this? You work too hard," he said breathily. His partner's slim servos pressed at then trailed down his scratched green-striped chest-plating. "Staying in one position for too long can be… unhealthy."

It took Lockdown an impressive half-cycle to adjust to the event: the intimate, tingling, crouching curl of Prowl against his abdominal-plating, the rich heat fluming off of him like an open volcano and the _attack_ itself. Then he grinned, lobbing the canon over his shoulder and wasting no time in easing his oil-smeared servos up Prowl's hot sides, grin widening when the other gave an honest, smiling shiver.

"Well, f'it's for my health..." Lockdown answered, vocals dripping with a gruff conscientiousness that provoked a limited smirk from Prowl—limited only in the fact he was too tense to do much more than press against Lockdown's thick body, resolute and stiff. With another thought, the bounty hunter's gooey expression shifted, but not much. "Wait a klik. One position: you callin' me a bore on the berth?"

"I'm simply offering my services as a distraction," Prowl assured him, ravenous aura buzzing through and distorting the ninjabot's calm words into an open-mouthed clutch for him. Primus, he could read this kid like a data-pad, pretense and pretty words and all—but something like this was _rare_. Lockdown's engine rumbled in gritty satisfaction; he craned down to meet his partner's unwavering gaze and grab the other's chin, tilting it at an almost appraising angle that brought their half-open mouths entirely too close.

"Distract me."

The bounty hunter chuckled, deep and full: already hot and attuned to that tone (and with stellar-cycles spent funneling, reading and absorbing vibrations through his tenderized circuits), Prowl shuddered at the sweetly invasive pulse of sound, ten times closer than before. Lockdown felt the difference. He traced the shudder through touch as it tore up his partner's lithe body, noticing—perhaps 'finally'--how the little ninjabot lit up like a choking star whenever he messed with sounds. Hiking the smaller mech closer, he growled into Prowl's shoulder, and again there came the subtle buck; the hitch of his anxious systems, already running high and hot.

Interesting—but it made sense, with the little slagger already so keen on vibrations with his Circuit-su scrap, that he'd feel Lockdown's vocals down to his Spark. That it was like a penetration, a soaking wrap of sensation, absolutely stunning and… titillating at the least. Sensual.

What came next was less an idea than an instant, fleshy urge immediately translated to action. Lockdown purred down to his substructure, then slid his wide, handsome mouth level with Prowl's chestplating and hummed low and strong. The reaction was instantaneous and staggering: silent, coy Prowl actually cried out, cool vocals cracking prettily as one servo clapped down and dug into Lockdown's wide shoulders. When Lockdown hummed louder—earning himself another throaty, squirming exhalation—Prowl literally forced him away from his chassis with a noisy heave. When the bounty hunter glanced up, the little ninja looked beyond bedraggled. The creature of coiled lust had since been unraveled into a puddle by his attack: Prowl's visor flickered in sweet anguish, his mouth open, aspirating thinly.

"Never took you for a music lover," Lockdown leered.

Maybe a musical lover—those cries sounded pretty damn melodious to the bounty hunter.

"You have unique vocals," Prowl managed weakly, some vague, fluttering veil of his normal expertise in decorum shining through the fog of want.

Lockdown hardly wasted time smirking. After a preliminary scrape of his dentals along Prowl's slender neck, just to get his shoulders down, Lockdown went straight for his chassis again with a near-malicious speed. Gasping, Prowl bucked, anxiously straining to force his partner away, to the point where he nearly toppled off of Lockdown's lap entirely-- then Lockdown finally managed to pin the little squirmer in between his arms and his hulking black chest and hummed hard and strong atop his glowing chamber-plating. Prowl's legs clamped down convulsively and he cried out again, far louder than before: the close-quarter shop rang with it. He hardly struggled, but buckled under the consuming sensation, Spark blazing and pulsing in a panic underneath Lockdown's scalding, pressing mouth.

The torture lasted no more than a few kliks. An evil increase in decibels led to one last honest wrenching yell from the taut ninjabot before he lost power with a muffled flash and a gust of static. Lockdown, startled by the self-contained explosion, sat for a few kliks in blinking silence. Slowly, he cocked an optic-ridge. He looked slightly put out after the first few moments of holding his limp, steaming partner, perhaps due to his own unattended Spark: then after a bare cycle, Prowl rebooted, and the look on his long, elegant face took care of everything.

After one-hundred-something stellar-cycles, Prowl was speechless—not silent, but genuinely speechless.

His visor lit, then widened as he stared at his partner with a fresh uncertainty so complete it was ridiculous, totally at odds with his undignified splay in the other mech's lap. Lockdown chuckled, then guffawed long and hard as the ninjabot's expression crept, self-conscious and unsure and suspicious, from nervous to utterly mortified. Prowl began to sputter—another first—and tucked one servo up to cover his chamber plating, minutely twisting away from his partner—regardless of the fact the other bot was actually curled around him.

"D-don't," he began thickly. He winced. "Er. Do that."

That made his partner laugh all over again, all the way from his engine. Finally, after Prowl had desiccated into a glaring little lump of unhappy mech, Lockdown drawled:

"Primus, if I'da known it was gonna be this easy to set you off—"

"It was superificial! It barely reached my core," Prowl half-hissed in a fluster, then looked aggravated that he was arguing about his own satisfaction and longevity—undignified, to be certain. He was falling into an eons-old trap the lecher always set for him—that of encouraged lasciviousness--but Lockdown just shook his head, chuckling.

"I was just gonna say, I never would'a made that gimmick to test you."

Prowl's hastily-erected, crispy defenses toppled at the mention of that sordid incident. More salt on the wound. He shrunk a bit in Lockdown's grip, fighting to frown for the right reason: that he regretted the fact that the 'toy' debacle could have been averted, not the fact that Lockdown eventually would have found an excuse to make it anyways. At least it had been under good pretense, even if the results were just as humiliating. Thus subdued, he huffed as Lockdown took to stroking his fairings in a way that was anything but lazy: it was active, talented, and Prowl became aware of the hushed hiss of the bounty hunter's Spark, excited dark aura still slithering outwards.

He looked up; Lockdown grinned down at him, burgeoning lust as easily recovered as the floor-tossed canon would be after they parted. Prowl smothered the urge—reflex--to sigh: already he felt a little core-achy and was… still recovering from a ridiculous experiment. For a moment, he wanted nothing more than to skulk off to his room then Lockdown, perhaps sensing the retreating tide of willingness, hummed three dirty notes into Prowl's neck and the young mech stiffened immediately. After the whiplash of his premature overload, it hurt slightly in the Spark-choking way, but the half-remembered tune of the stupidly simple drinking song evened out and soaked in and left Lockdown with another pile of gold-detailed (if half-miserable and _outed_) putty. Prowl groaned… for many, many reasons.

"Repeat performance?"

Prowl smiled faintly at his partner's brazen eagerness, but figured it was only his due: he had approached Lockdown, after all, and he had to be kind if he expected Lockdown not to use this weakness like the weapon it was.

"Second verse, same as the first," the ninjabot sighed, and knew the moment that Lockdown's strong servos tweaked his fairings and his mouth scraped along the edge of his windshield that there wasn't a chance in Pit that he was going to receive anything like mercy, because if there was one thing his partner couldn't resist, it was a shiny new weapon. Plainly put, the fat lady had sung—and exceptionally well, at that.

He was doomed.


	24. Friends

A/N: Yay, we add another character to our (pitifully limited) arsenal!

A quick word about OCs: I adore them when done correctly. Too often they _aren't,_ but I love when they are presented to flesh out the core characters—because after all, the damn universe must have more 'bots in it than a quintet of Autobots and a few deranged Decepticons, and Lockdown probably had a friend at one point… maybe. It's awfully stark, though, having a closeted little world with just Prowl and Lockdown: they need _people to interact with_ for heaven's sake. That said, I hope my darling OCs don't seem pretentious or 'attention-stealy', but I take time to develop them so they don't just seem like limp filler characters. I'm _nervous_ about this one, but hopefully, you'll warm to her like I did! Give her a chance, I beg you?

Okay, off my box of soap! God, I love what these two DO to Lockdown. After this, his life is either going to be the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever, or a maddening mix of both. Anyways, enjoy!

(Also, I kinda imagine Torque to sound a bit (the Cybertronian equivalent of) syrupy-thick Scottish. Kinda post-lifelong-smoker grittiness as well, but really nice to listen to. Yumyum!)

* * *

Friends

* * *

For those who could afford their services, Lockdown and Prowl's reputation was enough to bring customers straight to them. During their 'Good Times', no job was searching required and contracted marks were clean, solid jobs, devoid of troubling factors like competition. Every so often, however, the two were forced (or compelled by an incredible, glistening sum) to take a bounty from the circuit. The Feed mainly dealt in intergalactically pertinent, legally-issued warrants for arrest, complete with a detailed list of offenses. Obviously Prowl felt a bit more comfortable turning certified crooks into shiny-badged law enforcers, but Lockdown didn't care for the omniscient bureaucracy aspirating down his struts when he took to the job with his often less-than-legal methods and even more suspect tools.

Also, the private contractors were often a bit more lax about the physical state of their mark upon delivery: accidental deaths weren't frowned on quite as much, and often followed with a pretty bonus. Lockdown liked his customers best when they didn't badger him to fill out physical harm releases, which uptight law-enforcers often demanded he do after he dragged in a bleeding (but still breathing!) lump in place of their wanted being. Red tape pissed him off to no end.

This job, therefore, was a little odd in all respects. Lockdown seemed particularly motivated when the bulletin was posted: a washed-up but shockingly famous mafia leader had escaped from prison and Moot was plowing towards the backwater agriculture-refinery planet 'Benben' had hitchhiked to within the megacycle. Prowl was confused, as the hit was both heftily lucrative and entirely too limited in the projected search-area: therefore, up for ridiculous amounts of competition. But there was no time (or patience) for questions with the rest of the bounty-hunting universe knocking on Benben's proverbial door, and what followed was a complex, week-long cocktail of surveillance-runs and reconnaissance and ship-cloaking. Docked at Moot's controls, Lockdown lobbed insufficient, grunty explanations over his shoulder as he executed trick after trick, but his partner, programming whiz as he was, was sharp enough to fill in the gaps.

They snuck around in the purple-black night through the rural hills, evading farmers and hunters alike; Prowl had to shake his head every time prideful Lockdown supplied a petty, jargon-littered comment regarding a competitor's sloppy tactics, even if it felt rather good to sneak under their olfactory receptors without evoking so much as a twitch. Finally, they managed to locate Benben. The aged alien was hiding with a recently-recovered, overly-sincere posse, who were planning to ship him out (and probably proceed to murder him in intergalactic airspace for ease of mafia politics) the moment they could evade the lurking authorities. Their time, therefore, was limited, and a dead Benben meant no bounty.

The final cinch happened in a matter of megacycles: each partner completed his side of the deal (jamming communications, knocking out sentry) and met for a two-'bot rush at the intercepted pick-up location. When they broke into the dark warehouse, however, several things happened at once. The dry door splintered inwards; Prowl boosted up to the moss-clogged ceiling and braced himself between two rotted girders, shuriken already between his digits, and Lockdown whipped his harpoon off his back and activated up his arm-mounted canon with a few hissing plating-shifts. They expected guards; they expected a dark, glaring stretch of woodchip-filled, banter-less silence, then a mad rush for weapons: a _brawl_.

Instead, smack in the center of the moldy room, an acute series of clicks answered them and a slim gun was leveled at Lockdown's white face by a bipedal, purple-plated something with one pede propped atop a dirty heap that markedly resembled Benben—albeit a bit more bruised and terrified than the image on the Feed.

Prowl frowned deeply, processor racing: someone had beat them to it. Taken advantage of their preparation and slipped in. The ninjabot's optics, already switched to the poisonous green of night-vision, picked out the organic forms of the expected henchmen, scattered on the ground like thrashed scarecrows. They had been downed with minimal struggle, according to the intact shipping boxes still piled cleanly about them. The warehouse was utterly silent as the two hunters stared each other down, tension underscored by the far-away moan of warning sirens.

Prowl tightened among the rafters as Lockdown lifted his servos slightly, unable to see his partner's expression from his position but bracing for a grunt of a commcall and an order to swoop up and slam down and disarm—then the enemy lowered its weapon, and executed a liquid shift of its… hips?

"Lockdown, honey," she—definitely she--exclaimed dryly, holstering the gun and repositioning herself atop Benben, who squealed into the dirt. "And I thought this solar-cycle couldn't get any better! I should have known you couldn't resist a bounty this big."

Prowl's optics widened, but had switched to his partner. Wiry, discerning Lockdown paused a klik, seeming not to consider her but to put on a subtle show of considering her, then—of all unexplained horrors—retracted his canon.

"Torque."

Prowl couldn't tell whether the single word was friendly, aggressive or a gritty mix of both. He stayed where he was. Prompted by a look or gesture from the other hunter, Lockdown nodded to their stolen hit.

"That mite? I owe him."

"Money? You and the rest of Sigma-K quadrant," she responded, never flinching when one of the downed guards gave a warbling moan of pain behind her. In fact, neither 'bot moved; both made a pointed effort to stay still, optics locked together. A sharp-edged, pungent rapport filled the grey gap between the two hunters, no mistake, but Prowl couldn't begin to trust it until Lockdown gave him an explanation of this new player—which, for Lockdown, could lie in any number of twisted relations and situations and legal offenses. Down below him, Prowl's antisocial partner actually chuckled.

"An aft-kicking, more like. Figured this'd be the best opportunity for doin' it," Lockdown grunted, tattooed face splitting in a coarse grin. "Payback is always better when you actually get paid for it."

"And that's how you run," she sighed, vocals rich with an airy, comfortable amusement that the dark warehouse certainly didn't merit—especially when Lockdown should be tackling her and securing their bounty. She took out her gun again, glowing optics breaking from the huge mech's face to probe the corners of the room. "But before we set to chatting our gears clean, there's someone else here."

Lockdown looked confused for a moment, nearly bristling at the thought of another competitor bursting in on their back-alley apprehension, then swatted at the air with a puff from his vents.

"Yeah. Come on out, Prowl," he called over his shoulder. "She's a friend."

Hesitating a bare moment, Prowl flipped from the ceiling, jumpjet boosters flaring as he touched down amongst a sullen puff of old hay. Shuriken still angled in his servos, he walked calmly to Lockdown's side.

"You have friends?" Prowl asked curiously, optics locked on the other hunter, who now casually tilted her weapon to the rafters. Lockdown actually didn't glare at him: the question was perfectly valid.

"Of course not. Friend is the apathetic label he applies to those he's become too tired of fending off in the emotional sense," Torque snorted, giving Prowl a smirk somehow dazzling with its precision. "I fought hard for my title."

Lockdown grunted skeptically, and Torque leveled her optics at him like a cite, even if the smirk remained.

"It was certainly an upgrade from 'barely-tolerated annoyance'."

"Not much a'one," Lockdown sneered, and proceeded to glare at her again—this time with a very distinct, very not-evil smirk to top the bill.

In all his stellar-cycles of function, some of which had been spent among the strangest and most stressful conditions known to 'bot-kind, Prowl had never been so sincerely weirded out as he was in that moment. After a bit of cutthroat banter, ss if the situation wasn't bizarre enough, the unflappable femme offered them a trade: her (still-whimpering) catch in exchange for passage to a nearby galaxy. She didn't need the money, apparently, and seemed keen—very keen--on traveling with them specifically.

Her whimsy remained untouched even when Lockdown threw a small (very mature) fit and snapped at her to get a ride with the money from Benben, of course insulted by prospect of being handed, hog-tied and tagged, the bounty he'd worked so hard for in his own right. The fuming bounty hunter nearly kicked at the dirt, glaring at the other 'bot's resolute smile (as Benben pleaded in his hissing language to be let go, _please_, he would pay them more than they ever hoped to gain from the Rennadine law enforcers), but Prowl knew they needed the money in the first place. The ninjabot simply wondered how long his partner's sizzling pride would hold up against the press of his greed. The femme herself was a huge, convoluted factor being woven into the equation, considered, calculated behind narrowed red optics—but in what favor and to what effect, Prowl did not know.

In the end, when a rising, siren-punctuated clamor tightened like a noose around the old building and its porous wood, rousing some of the henchmen from their concussion-induced stupor, Lockdown made a thoroughly disgusted noise and stalked off without a glance at his partner. The guttural noise of his transformation (and following escape into the sticky night) made Prowl arch his optic ridge, but to his shock, Torque somehow knew to duck and sling Benben over her broad shoulder and follow at a satisfied pace, a smile on her full mouth. Prowl stared, then got into gear. Frowning, he zinged along the messy path Lockdown had cleared through the farm scrub, weighed only by a heavy processor.

Anyone able to correctly extract _meaning_ out of Lockdown's grumbling, indirect, counter-intuitive style of acquiescence, after all, was someone to respect—and possibly fear. Prowl followed the two hunters to the ship at a cautious pace, keeping an auditory unit peaked for possible interference or second-hand-grabbers, but all was clear. Above all, the ninjabot kept 'Torque' in his sights, dense, comfortable partner-partner equilibrium upset to zero-gravity by this striding, well-equipped invader, who looked at him with as much burning interest as he did her.

Possible confrontation and reality-redefinition aside, this promised to be… fascinating.

* * *

Within a decent span of time, Prowl and Lockdown were alone again: with a word or two, Torque transformed (a slick, three-wheeled vehicle that emerged with an oddly tinny sound) and drove off to her own post to retrieve her equipment. With Benben tied up in a properly cloaked Moot (still shuddering and bawling from being abused and casually bickered over by robotic beings four times his size), Prowl was still holding out on the chance that Lockdown would pack up and leave the femme there with an ugly, entirely natural grin, but the ship stayed grounded. His partner merely kicked back and _waited_—barely chuckling when Prowl pegged him with an expression so blank it begged no less than a megacycle of explanation.

Lockdown thumbed toward the monitors where Torque had vanished from sight, shuttering his optics.

"Shoot."

Prowl didn't know where to begin. The entire concept of Lockdown having… _relationships_ was so foreign—a gargantuan block dumbly jammed against a round hole—that he couldn't think of anything regarding the two of them yet. So he focused on the new factor.

"Your… _friend_. Where did she come from?"

"Cybertron." Lockdown shrugged. Before Prowl could make an annoyed sound, he added: "She was around before the factions split."

Prowl's visor brightened, mouth dropping open.

"No," he murmured, searching Lockdown's serious face. Finding no chink and no cockeyed joke lying in wait, his Spark nearly wavered with the thought of it. "Before… Autobot and Decepticon?"

It was formidable—a gap of generations. He didn't think there was anyone still functioning who could recall such a time, save for the ones who began the uprising and fought it in turn. Lockdown unshuttered his optics lazily, stretching in his scratched-up navigator chair and eyeing the empty nightvision-green monitors in a way that was almost _fond_.

"Yep. Sure don't make 'em like they used to."

"Is that all you have to say? Primus, darling, I was around before there were _femmes_."

Prowl turned, nearly flicking his shuriken out at the sudden sound. The other bounty hunter—_huntress_--stood in the airlock doorway, one metal magazine under her arm and a string of cameras looped around her shoulder. Her outpost was either disturbingly close or she was ridiculously fast. Now, with his night-vision turned off alongside his battle computer, Prowl could see (comprehend) their visitor in the reddish lighting of the ship: she was a scant bit larger than himself, possessed of killer, wheel-heavy heel struts, yellow optics and oddly bulky purple plating. Tiny waist aside, her shape was something not possessed of the forcible slick compact-look of the current day—and for good reason. She smiled at him.

Then his processor figured in what she had just said, and his logic coding hiccupped for the second time in half as many cycles. He could only make a dull, hazy sound, staring unabashedly at her (his?) body and all of its expertly executed curves… her expertly executed, billion-some-odd stellar-cycle old curves. Her smile widened wickedly—apparently pleased with what was a common yet satisfying reaction.

"That was a Pit of an overhaul," she drawled luxuriously, then walked into Moot's quiet bridge, setting down her equipment against the wall under Lockdown's interested optic. "Still, there's nothing quite like finding your true image. This suited me better."

Torque spoke with perfectly functional, clear vocalizers, but her language software was pleasantly antiquated, contributing what could only be known as an _accent_ to the flawless Cybertronian sonar functions. It was refined but nonetheless robust, tickled with an easy enthusiasm. Interesting. Absorbing everything he could, Prowl thought himself (as much as he was capable of processing anything, off-kilter as he was, still stuck on the fact that Lockdown had a 'bot _who he did not want to kill_) nothing but a spectator until Torque turned from the last of her house-keeping and crossed her arms, regarding him with that same smoldering interest of earlier.

"And?" She prompted. "Who is this?"

Lockdown didn't move to answer her; he flicked a servo at Prowl behind her back, flatly relinquishing the responsibility of introductions. Stilling and straightening uncomfortably under the shift of focus, the young ninjabot frowned mildly, raising a servo.

"Prowl," he supplied slowly, studying her handsome face. When she didn't stir, he added: "I am… Lockdown's partner."

Torque's mouth opened, then closed. When it opened again, she was smiling so widely that Lockdown hunched and rolled his optics to see it, especially when she twisted to hit him with the full blast of her squirming mirth before starting towards Prowl, arms wide.

"Wonderful!" She exclaimed, rich vocals beyond thrilled--as though she never thought she'd hear those words in any language or combination. Prowl was coming to realize that his taken-for-granted position as Lockdown's partner was more and more a freak accident and a rarity with every new being he came across; that he didn't fully comprehend the cutthroat kind of 'bot the bounty hunter had been lauded as beforehand.

With his position as a bounty hunter _and_ a partner, bizarre events were both expected and subsequently coped with, but Prowl couldn't help stiffening up when the ancient femme strode forward and _hugged_ him, bundling him into her tough arms like a doll. Stuttering, Prowl took the absurd, grappling affront as well as he was able, utterly disturbed expression earning him a curt snicker from Lockdown (who watched with a worryingly vindicated air). The platonic, smooshed gesture was strange, stranger still since all of his time with his standoffish partner—then he felt her energy shift, like a ready gush of warm, static-laced fluid along his plating.

Circuitry snapping to attention, Prowl was able to jerk back and catch the strange femme's wrist before her digits dug into his foramen gap, twisting from under her heavy arms and sharply folding the offending limb into a lock-hold. Torque struck with her other arm; Prowl deflected it and she fought back. They jabbed and swiped and parried in a sharp series of metal-on-metal clangs, then Prowl knocked her arm aside and twist-pinned it to her front. He stood in front of her, black plating chill from the sudden attack, engine winding down in prickly growls from the roar, but still stared at her steadily—less surprised than he should have been.

She was, after all, Lockdown's peer. She had to be strange and ruthless and moderately unhinged in one way or another. Immobilized by the holds, Torque craned around to look at Lockdown—who, as expected, hadn't moved at all.

"Quick to strike but not to harm. I approve of this one!" She exclaimed, her narrow face-plating lighting up as she looked back to Prowl from behind her arm. "You have an appreciation for life in you. I can see it."

The sunny burst of calm did not cause Prowl to release her. Reverent of life though he was, he was still cautious—and possibly, there was something glowing in her that interfered with his most basic of electric rhythms and his grip wasn't as liquid as usual. Finally, after a few kliks immobilized against him (a serious young thing), she laughed, saying almost formally:

"Please, you may release me. I was playing with you."

Hidden optics risking a glance at his partner, Prowl let go, processor nearly crackling with slow, curious confusion. Unwarranted attack aside, she didn't push it enough to be offending: no, she wasn't _trying_ to offend him, but to test the waters of a fellow practitioner. Playing. Her goodwill was palpable, even if her skills were as sharp as knives. He stared at her cluelessly—and, as was always the case with something he didn't understand, elastic, soaring fascination was quick to follow, one hand to his cheek like an old friend. It only intensified when she ran her unusually clunky servos over her carpal joint and seemed to take stock of something, studying him as keenly as he did her.

"Your grip: you are… from the Alkaline school of Metallikato, are you not?"

He nearly jumped at the long-buried name.

"Indeed, madam."

"Hm. I may have an antiquated base of knowledge, but I always make sure I'm up to date with the latest fads," she quipped, looking satisfied.

Prowl couldn't help but stare. Surely, metallikato—an ancient practice nearly forty-seven millennia old—should never be referred to as a 'fad'. In the deep silence, with all three 'bots staring at each other in one way or another, Benben began to bawl again.

* * *

With Benben properly handed over to the shiny-badged authorities within the next megacycle, quiet Prowl did nothing more than give the two hunters a lasting glance as Torque led Lockdown into his own shop and closed the door behind them. Shaking himself free with a grunt, Lockdown made sure she didn't shove him into his chair; energy deflected, she busied herself with gathering a bench. The bounty hunter took his seat with a certain amount of stiffness: a grimacing apprehension for an attack well underway, judging by the ready gleam in his old companion's optics. Within moments, she was seated, knees angled together with a maddening smile on her face.

"Tell me everything."

There it was. Lockdown shrugged, looking to the side.

"Nothin' to tell."

"Please! Your lonely little interstellar life has taken a complete turnaround since last I saw you! And that was, what… two-hundred stellar-cycles ago?" She demanded, then softened with a plain sigh. "I'm your _friend_, Lockdown. So, if I am indeed as close to you as you would have me think I'm not, I should deserve at least… two words a stellar-cycle, correct?"

Lockdown looked away—_further_ away—and gave a dour rumble, knowing full well where this was going.

"Two centuries: you owe me four-hundred words. That's at _least_ a conversation and a half—I'll cut it down to just one conversation in your interest, as long as you throw in an adjective or an adverb every once in a while," she said sufferingly. The resentful half-swoon was not long in lasting: she straightened on her ridiculous bench, one servo under her chin, and paused just long enough to make Lockdown grit his dentals. "So? Who _is_ your freshly-activated _partner_?"

"He's been around long enough to learn how to tighten his own bolts," Lockdown grumbled, throwing her a disgruntled look. "Y'know I wouldn't mess with him otherwise."

"Honey, his model's so brand-spanking new I'm surprised it's on the market yet," she scoffed, kneading it into a knowing chuckle as she eyed her old friend in return—a potent cocktail of unyielding, warm and even. "Don't get defiant on me, protophile: you're the one that decked him out like a piece of candy. Or did those stunning mods come with the first-edition package?"

Lockdown's face soured into a grimace, optics smoldering half-heartedly. Torque, unruffled, looked back over her shoulder toward the bridge—and Prowl. She hmmm-ed.

"Does he—"

"Know how pretty he is? No," Lockdown supplied flatly, with surprising (if bored) readiness.

"No, he knows! He simply doesn't care. Or rather, I don't think he realizes how it matters. That's so rare," she mused. "Where did you find him?"

"Warring planet. Last stronghold of the Autobot defense after Megatron opened the space bridge. Kid was stuck with a bunch of backwards repair-bots who were tryin' to keep the Allspark out of Megs' servos, even after he'd cordoned the place off to have his own personal safari of it." He paused to scratch at his neck before growling: "They were basically waitin' in line to have their plugs pulled."

"That's utterly awful. The poor thing," she whispered, more sincerely than she should have. There lay a preternaturally true understanding in her, an instant sorrow so easily accessed—so consuming and honed, sadly, by yawning millenia of practice—that any 'bot would stall to see it. She thought on the former Autobot and all of his ash-smeared troubles, seeming to grow smaller and denser… then brightened as she always did, regarding Lockdown with a fluffy mixture of coyness and surprise. "So you rescued him!"

"Kid rescued himself: I just opened the hatch," Lockdown snorted.

"Still, that's an odd risk for you. Letting someone into your ship."

Unbidden, a clever smirk inched over the bounty hunter's face.

"We'd had… talks before."

"You seduced him," she said dryly, all too accustomed to Lockdown's business language. He chuckled.

"I saw somethin' I liked."

Unspoken was the fact that Lockdown usually went after what he wanted until it was either snug in his servos or shattered in a million pieces. Torque was merely grateful it wasn't the second, even if her friend had never coveted a _bot_ before—an interesting development.

"And, initial bolt-rattling terror aside, I fail to see how he couldn't grow to abide you," she parried, spearing the hulking mech with an appraising optic. She turned the image and her limited data of the young, slick thing over in her processor. "Still. I nearly missed him back on Rennadine, hiding like that. He's well-adapted for stealth and seems quick enough to fend you off: that's two a points in his favor. Not to mention survival."

Lockdown simply shrugged, as if the child and the entire unthinkable, alien _cohabitation_ situation explained itself, after a lifetime of the iron-walled solitude that so defined him. The femme's business-like demeanor couldn't withstand the easy push of Lockdown's red optics, lazily half-shuttered and glowing above a cozy gap-toothed grin. Somehow, seeing him lolling in his chair like the wiry, crusty monster—brat—that he was, like the Predacon that ate the Insecticon, it softened her. For her, they had been too long apart.

Lockdown's slovenly grin cleaned itself up a bit under her playfully stern gaze. Torque rose from her bench started toward him, servos playing along her armored arms.

"A _partner_. Now, why in the universe don't you call me and tell me these things?"

"Like I said, nothin' to tell," Lockdown repeated indolently. _Not when you were going to drag it out of me anyways_, Torque filled in crisply. Lockdown. Adamant on his own non-involvement, as always, with something of a challenge playing on his wickedly-marked face. Her blurry Spark gave a pleasant hiccup, and she slunk closer, shaking her head fondly.

"Oh, Lockdown. I missed you," she sighed. Her servos touched on each arm of Lockdown's shop chair and she leaned in, tingling plate-scraping proximity to the other hunter earning her no more than an unimpressed huff of air. "I missed hearing from you, I missed the occasional hunt with you…"

She paused for a moment, looking down at his green-striped chassis, then met his optics with a sly, plush smile.

"Would it be uncouth to say I missed your body as well?"

The ascent was feline, with purposeful luxurious scraping of warming plates: she slid into his huge lap and Lockdown did no more than move his arms aside to give her passage into the sensitive, close space in front of his chassis. She took a moment to settle, expertly tucking thighs around spiked wheels and so forth. Thick digits cupping his chin, Torque kissed the mech gently, the simple, sweet push and energy-field-brush causing her to melt into his hard frame.

"Two hundred stellar-cycles without your company can make a 'bot go into withdrawal for a real overload," she purred, vocals gravelly with the weight of what was beneath her. She slid her arms over his shoulders, navigating between the spikes, and Lockdown's engine idled higher—then the femme pressed her face into his neck, aspirating deeply. "I still adore the way you smell."

It was easy, with a nearly passive, lascivious glee, to give into a pattern cultivated by untold stellar-cycles of this exact scenario—but even as the hunter's systems revved and hummed underneath the surge and clench of lust so habitual as to be rote, a cramped discomfort plugged his finer functions. This nasty glitch slowed his servos, reactions disjointed against the usual symphonic rhythm of their preliminary intimacies. His servos skidded rather than slid along the warming curves of her, because Prowl had watched them go in together and was probably already making assumptions.

They would be right, of course, and the kid would respect his thorny closed-door privacy, but there was no way to hide an energy-flare that big behind a simple partition. He'd register it, no matter what. The fact that Lockdown was uncomfortable with that fact did more to scramble his efforts to go along with Torque's classic 'stress-relief' than the actual probability that Prowl would be pissed with him afterwards—but all the same, the idea gnawed at him, finally dulling his physical reciprocation to the pretty pervert in his lap to an occasional flick of his digits as his stuffed processor locked up.

It took Torque, so settled into their sweet, sweeping routine, an impressive amount of time to realize she was straddling a statue. Her own clean-pumping mechanics winding down in the unprecedented, _unheard-of_ silence, her servos stilled from their busy scrub on his flanks. She drew away, then tilted her head uncomprehendingly, sculpted mouth falling open. Lockdown didn't meet her optics. Instead, he refreshed his vocals with a vague beep and a hiss, drumming his digits on his chair arm.

"Merciful Primus, did someone cauterize your Sparkchamber?" Torque asked incredulously, radiating a genuine (if surprise-burnt) amusement. "You're refusing me!"

"M'not, Torque. It's—" Lockdown cut himself off, looking like energon in his tubing had risen to a nauseating, pressing degree. He fidgeted under the weight of her stare, then ground out quietly and _fast_, "It's the kid."

She stared at him as though he were glitching—and perhaps he was. Stranded, Lockdown looked to the side and muttered out of the corner of his mouth: "He throws a fit if I mess around."

Untold feats of data-processing filled the unreal silence, garnished by a horrible, horrible shift in the femme crouched so unmindfully between his thighs.

"With… other 'bots. In an intimate fashion," she clarified carefully, sounding far too captivated by this downwards-spiralling conversation. Lockdown shifted uncomfortably, engine puttering down to a dirty, dissatisfied whine.

"S'hard to pull off jobs if he's pissed with me," he griped, still avoiding her visual link. "Kid can be a regular monkey wrench."

"So you're refusing out of professional courtesy."

Wary as he was of her mocking tone, he still grunted when she popped him one in the chassis, emitting a scandalized noise.

"You're 'facing him! Exclusively!"

"'Exclusively' doesn't cash in when he's the only compatible thing for light-years," he sneered. "I'd be in serious need of a defragging if I had somethin' like _that_ in my ship and didn't strip its gears every once in a while."

"That's not an excuse for monogamy. You would honestly deny me for his sake? For_ his sake_?"

There was no ire in the demand: only excitement. Lockdown's motor only irked out an unhappy woof, but that was enough.

"You care for him!" Her exclamation was a veritable, hand-clappy squirm, curtailed by an unsettled silence. She looked at him with widened optics, murmuring blankly, "After all this time, I'm still not sure if you care for _me_."

"I'm devoted to you, gal," he rumbled winningly, one huge servo cupping her dark lower back. "There's a difference."

Whatever his motives, she was to the point where she couldn't be distracted by his touch: there were far, far bigger things at stake. He realized it (with a perturbed frown) when she propped both servos on his lukewarm chassis, leaning in eagerly.

"Wait—wait a klik. Just how long has he been with you?"

"'Bout… a century, give or take."

"A century!" She gasped, fitfully processing the idea of impatient, brutal Lockdown _coexisting_ for so unimaginable a stretch—and under _restrictions! _Stated by someone else, for Spark's sake! "Primus! And does this… restriction go both ways?"

Lockdown eyed her mistrustfully, viscous fluids welling up yet further. Too patient, she motioned with a digit, circling the air.

"Do you become upset if he blows some other 'bot's breakers?"

Lockdown shifted as though his struts were dented, frame jerking and grinding with discomfort as he pulled up a certain incident with a white-plated dirt-smear of an Elite protoform—then buried it just as quickly, shrugging his massive shoulders.

"Upset ain't in the contract. He can do whatever he likes. Can't miss what y'don't have," he grumbled a touch too resentfully. Torque rattled her head.

"Oh no—_most_ 'bots can't. You, however—_you_, you greedy brat--" She barked a laugh into her servo, then cried, "My lord, Lockdown! You're in love!"

Lockdown didn't honor it with so much as a snort. That would have been admitting that it was even possible enough to be considered _amusing_. It was not. Would not. Would never be. No—and he knew Torque too well to attempt to deflect her. Torque settled into the stupidly far-fetched idea with a fuzzy, delusional glee, processor racing and adapting and _exalting_, then figured in some stained variable that caused her streamlined features to knot up slightly.

"Hm. A cross-allegiance love affair," she said after a moment, all plodding curiosity.

"We're neutrals, Torque. Clean slate. Ain't an affair if there aren't any allegiances to cross," Lockdown rumbled warningly. Torque arched her optic ridge.

"Oh _please_. Surely he's figured it out already—or you've told him?" She searched his expression, then snorted: "Even if you _were_ crafted with those sparkling blue Autobot optics, you would have swapped them out for red ones the moment you could! Just to spook everyone."

It was true. Even if he were an Autobot, he would've changed himself to appear Decepticon. Just to let everybody know that backing off was the best option at any point. He looked back to his old friend, who had quieted. When she spoke, her vocals were solid but soft, full of ever-ache regret.

"I still find that so sad. Limiting 'bots like that… birthing them into a war without letting them pick sides according to their Spark."

"Autobot or Decepticon is a one-way street: it's built into their Spark, not programmed in," Lockdown said gruffly. Torque shook her head knowingly.

"I realize that. But… still. It's cruel, in a way. Regardless of their initial slants, there is capacity for growth that factions deny."

Her times had changed. The universe had changed in turn, cauterizing two halves of a bleeding race in order to make this gap natural from each creature's conception, but she remembered a time where Cybertronians were Cybertronians: infinite, interchangeable, brimming with unencumbered potential. She smiled, tapping Lockdown's chin.

"You should get your optics swapped. You would look dashing with orange ones."

Lockdown rumbled something noncommittal and faintly derogatory, simply relieved that the subject had changed: he would have given anything to coax (or bludgeon) Torque from her runaway thought train of earlier. Thus diverted, they griped briefly over paltry two-hundred-year things, as ancient friends are wont to do. Torque finally raised herself, creaking gently, from Lockdown's lap and back onto her pedes.

In the horribly brief span of time it took her to travel to her bench, however, she swelled again, thinking on the sweetly impossible something that had happened in the time she was away. Torque turned and looked at her hulking, equally impossible companion, random as anything—she had been around so long, her sense of social 'timing' had locked up into a sporadic, jerking and screeching internal rhythm, which in turn gave way to unforgivable rashes of smiling abruptness—and said quite seriously:

"I must warn you, Lockdown: the first time it happens, you're liable to become very, very stupid."

Lockdown stared at her cluelessly for a moment, then made the looming connection with a doomed, stung twitch.

"Quit—delete it!" he snapped, startled into saying anything to get the huntress' bright optics off of himself. Torque preened, glancing toward the bridge door (and the quiet young creature that had somehow fallen into Lockdown's iron-guarded existence) again, and waved her servos as she sat down.

"I'm just warning you ahead of time! Have you merged yet?"

"_Yet_? Does it _look_ like we're walkin' around with our cores copied to each other's banks?" He said, looking like he was about to eject. He snorted in disgust. "You're overdue for a defrag, you antique."

Unfazed, she went on about Prowl for unbearable cycles, asking (horribly personal) questions and growing truly excited on her silly bench; Lockdown shuffled and growled as was his due. Finally, driven to the end of his chain as her vocals dripped down to a sticky coo, the riled bounty hunter finally ground out:

"How come you can stand t'be so interested? We're 'probly all the same to you: you've seen everything."

That stalled her. Rarely, if ever, did Lockdown ever speak of or express interest in her life before their encounter—as with Prowl, questions simply weren't asked, and Lockdown wasn't one to _want_ to know. Such was his determination to be rid of their subject, but it caused Torque to quiet again, then shake her head carefully.

"No. It's society that's so exhausting."

War, war, madness, mayhem, unconditional hatred from a brother. A brief respite-- only to plunge inwards again due to a single soul's selfish act. Repetitive… seeing again and again a civilization's capacity to do evil… no matter the breed, no matter the society, no matter the promise, they always regress. Maddening.

"No, I focus on people—individuals—because they are always different, no matter the period. I focus on people so I don't have to acknowledge how the world around me drives forward but simply never changes," she murmured calmly, thick digits lacing together. "If I had loved the universe instead of souls, I would have gone mad long ago."

Lockdown didn't know what to say to that. There was a reason he never asked--but she saved him any attempts by looking up and smiling at her old friend, propping her chin on a servo.

"I'm just happy to see that you've finally found someone, Lockdown," she murmured. "I've wanted you to be happy for a long, long time."

"Lucky I was around that backwater sector for Starscream: otherwise, I might not've found him," he said sharply, settling back in his chair. "It all comes down to chance, gal. This ain't guaranteed, ain't permanent—it's just _workin'_ and that's all I'm shootin' for right now. Servo to port. Just glad the kid hasn't backfired on me yet."

"But you're happy."

The bounty hunter paused, optics dimming.

"Maybe," he huffed a little too thoughtfully. Seeing her expression (a silky unraveling of clouds for sunlight), he recovered with a prickly mutter, crossing his arms tightly. "Happy as contracts allow."

The two sat for an honest, quiet moment, calm with one another in a way new to both—which said something, after six-thousand stellar-cycles of brushing digit-tips. They sat and felt reverberating changes, carefully processing more than was their wont in the familiar yet novel silence. Lockdown, whether he sought it or not, found the utmost of approval—deeper and more fertile than the oily, ego-flavored approval of a viciously-executed hunt or any other fleeting superficial appreciation--in the huntress' serene expression. He smirked slightly to see it. Torque's handsome features quirked in a cantankerous, knowing way that was purely for him… then she leaned forward with a clean, sunny smile that certainly shouldn't have been as predatory as it was.

"So. When are you going to let me talk to him?"

Lockdown moaned, and realized a little too late that no amount of bounty-cash was worth this.


	25. Surrender

A/N: First of all, thanks so much for welcoming my extroverted little gender-bender :3 Yay! I promise, a) she's here for a reason and b) she'll prove her worth (also, check out my Deviantart account for a picture of her!).

Secondly, FLASHBACK PART ONE! Finally, right? I dearly hope this isn't predictable. I do believe Lockdown began as a 'Con, and I thoroughly explored the 'surprising' option of Autobot-ness, but it didn't click for me. Too… stereotypically surprising! I went for the unpretentious obvious.

So… it may be expected, but hopefully it's unique~! Um, also, this takes place… in the Great War, but in the middle-beginning of it, where everything's a little fanatical and rough around the edges. TFA timeline is very vague in canon, so I'd imagine that Ratchet was neck-deep in the end of the Wars, and I'd also imagine they stretched on for MILLENIA. Ew, Lockdown IS old. XD FINALLY, Moot, we see you ALIVE! Eventually. (… I think she's cuter as a ghost.)

Also, way too many OCs. SORRYSORRY.

* * *

Surrender

* * *

It wasn't their original assignment, to be sure, but Bar's team would have gone wherever the Command needed functioning servos.

His troupe of two (Autobot scouts) rooted a scant distance away, reduced to hunched shapes in the deep green night. Roller's engine ground quietly as the femme loaded fragments of fallen soldiers into her companion's main compartment. It had to be that way: Quickstop's nervous circuitry was such that she couldn't abide the crunching carnage laying in her, and even then her servos shook horribly while heaving the torsos off the explosion-blackened ground. They were always a little too heavy for her.

They weren't to the point that materials were scarce enough that they had to scavenge, but Bar suspected the time was drawing near, unless new deposits of ore were found. No, this was preventative measure. They gathered up the highest-ranked fallen to prevent Cons from getting their servos on any important info stored in the offline bot's banks: schematics, plans, coordinates, the like. Death-triggered data-wipes were in the process of being invented, but Bar was never one to bank on future developments to save the present. Moreso, they gathered the Autobots (dear fallen friends) to prevent them from being… defaced by their enemies.

Bar had heard rumors about sapping. He prayed they weren't true, even if his processor needn't stretch too far to imagine it in this day and age. Things—standards, morals--were falling too quickly to trace them, leaving only vaporous trails of descent, smelling of bitter sorrow and ash. Uprooted, distorted. They weren't even on Cybertron anymore: the 'Cons had moved to nearby planet and proceeded to decimate its local population in hopes of finding a new energy source. The Autobots had moved in to protect them and ended up tripling the carnage. Filthy, filthy fighting.

The two scouts and their leader moved around the battleground with quick, crunched movements, barely rising to walk and gather another weighty, cold, oil-smeared torso. Much like lightning, battle had never before struck twice in the same place, but Bar was beginning to doubt that sentiment: the battle raging nearby might overtake them, edging into the blackened valley where they gathered the corpses into their red ship. More importantly, he didn't know what faction they were closest to. It would make or break their survival, should the skirmish truly eclipse them. If they were caught in the middle of a battalion of 'Cons, their deaths were assured.

Reason as they may, following procedure in tense silence, all of them could feel that they had drifted behind enemy lines. The dark, ducking prickle of prey took root in their cores; they were too easily spooked by the flash and rumble of hot canons rationally too far away to worry about. Both of his teammates were wide-opticked and trembling, tripping and gasping. Exit was their first priority.

Times like these, he had to thank Primus he had a purpose—Sparks to protect. Otherwise, one might go mad.

Half-flinching from a girder-rattling explosion, Bar dropped what—who—he was holding when Quickstop shrieked, punctuated by the clang of her own load as she whipped out her gun. He straightened, looking around wildly and preparing for a violent retreat back to their ship, then followed the pristine red thread of his teammate's firearm cite. On the ridge of a nearby hill—they stood in a valley, up to their knees in rusting gore—a figure stumbled into sight, grasping for handholds in the tough brush. It staggered down the night-dark hill, crashing to its knees and nearly rolling, then struggled on, dull and steady.

Something about the size and the shape of it—lean, feral, masculine--told Bar it wasn't a 'Bot, but the jerky, creaking movements also told him it wasn't running at optimum efficiency. He narrowed his optics. Roller was at his side in an instant, more through panic than readiness; still in his alt-mode, his forelasers slid out and cited on the interloper, joined by the hasty click of Bar's arm canon. The far-away sounds of the 'bot's obdurate struggles were underscored by beep-blip of Roller's scan.

"It's of Cybertronian make," he huffed, engine whining nervously. It was an issue, as the native population was composed of meshed inorganic and organic elements. Bar tried not to look at the bleeding shells piled waist-high in his cabby.

"And? What's the signal?"

"It's a 'Con, sir," Roller said finally, but by then the scum was already too close. Bar caught a flash of insidious green and black as the 'Con extricated itself from a tangle of brush with a rip of its oversized servo. All three of them, low-grade energon running high and acidic in their tubing, jumped when the 'bot got close enough to make out the wickedly pointed symbol on its wide black chassis, then jerked again and fell flat on his front in the hard dirt.

A front, surely. A ploy. Hatred surged in Bar's substructure, ripe for one willing to take advantage of their side's _decency_.

"You're in Autobot territory; we have you in our cites!" Bar shouted, unsure if it was the truth. He zoomed in on his cite, finding the fiend's white head under the X. "Disable both servos!"

The mech lay motionless for a haggard cycle, keeping where he was. Then, slowly, he heaved himself to his knees and, even more slowly, as if in a stupor, raised one arm. It wavered slightly in the soot-black air, the other hanging limply down by his side. The scout team hissed and stiffened to see the a-symmetrical, suspicious-looking move; after a moment, Roller revved his engine short and sharp and re-focused his beams, crying out:

"You heard him, dissenter! Both servos where we can see 'em, mods exposed!"

Three sets of arachnid brittle limbs unfolded from his lean sides with a sound like crinkling plastic and hung motionless, clicking a little. A thick firearm struggled out of the black, half-peeled exostructure of his shoulders then clicked to an upright position. The motions were ponderous and slow, as though he was in a great amount of pain. Through it all, he did not move his right arm.

"Your _servos_!"

"Would if I could," the asymmetrical mech huffed dully, wide mouth twitching at the side. His vocals, probably compromised by another injury, were coarser than mangled metal. "Bum arm."

An unreal, brittle moment passed when they all realized that the 'Con had fully acquiesced, and, despite his suspicious movements, wasn't going to charge them. He simply kneeled where he was, red optics flickering fitfully, nearly swaying. At an utter loss, half of his processor still stuck on the battle raging so close by (they could feel the tremors in the dense ground), Bar commed his two teammates to keep their weapons raised, then lowered his own and took a strong step forward.

"What do you want?"

"Surrender," the mech rasped. If Bar would have laughed, it would have come out bitter and hateful. As it was, he only sneered.

"You're hardly in a state to demand it, filth."

"Naw. Surrender to you."

Bar stiffened, nearly stalling.

"You what?"

"Surrender. Yield. Give up. Me, to you." The half-crumpled Decepticon glanced up under his dirt-encrusted brow with a wry, pain-wracked grin, rumbling: "Now, d'you mind whiskin' me away in the name'a justice and all things good 'fore the 'Cons can strip us all together? 'Cause I'd really like to get outta this in a better state than your buddies there."

Though he mocked the fallen, scream-frozen soldiers at his pedes, there was a pointed distance in the term--'Cons--that simply didn't mesh with the scraped Decepticon sigil on the mech's green-striped chassis. But the group didn't have time to sort out identification issues: the aforementioned 'Cons were on their way, canons sounding off with a gritty, rattling proximity. An artillery shell hit the side of the valley, shaking the ground; the battle was upon them, with a hungry rush of sulfur-rich heat. Knowing how important enemy intel was to Command (and caught at the rationale-drained instant of hot escape) the team had no choice but to rush forward, grab the passive mech and manhandle his lanky but abominably solid form into their ship along with the last of the still-smoking databanks and tear out of the valley.

"Moot, full speed."

"Yes, sir."

Never once did they wonder why a 'Con would be on the run from his own.

* * *

Once they had unloaded the fragments into the hangar, they properly restrained the Decepticon with a pair of stasis cuffs. He was far larger up close: he smelled of burning foliage and grimy artillery powder, and his great spiked back loomed in front of Bar's face like a pulled punch as he snapped the mech's good wrist into the cuffs, then struggled with the limp appendage, wrenching it none-too-gently when necessary. The extra storage room became his cell, reinforced as it was; they sent Quickstop to gut it out beforehand, just to get her out of his rumbling presence. A moment longer and she might have short-circuited, and they had to maintain some fraction of façade if their charge was to be pliable--at least until they got him to Command.

The mech was surprisingly quiet through the ordeal. He had no barbs, but no flinches, and did not struggle once. Bar simply wanted to get him out of sight, growing to question his course of action even as he shut the door: but as quiet as their 'charge' was, his team made no effort to smother their own questions.

"Why would he come so willingly?"

Barely positioned at the carrier's controls, Bar half-glared behind him: Quickstop glanced at him nervously, then ducked her head. Roller put a servo to her sloping back. The two had gotten… unfittingly close over their term of service together. Bar grimaced inwardly, then thought about the question. Something to explain such atypical behavior from a killer.

"He's running from something, most likely. Typical 'Con," he snorted. "He's faking his arm, most likely."

"But… it's dead as scrap: all circuits dry, can't you feel it?"

The group went silent: it was true. There was no way he could be faking his injury. The subliminal electronic waves every Cybertronian radiated from the push and pull of their circuitry resonated within other receptive bots as a secondary non-optical form of being-registry, much like heat functioned for organics. The prisoner's limp, thorn-encrusted arm was like a clammy, deaf inkblot over their sensors. A dark spot. Dead. Whether it was self-inflicted or not, however, was another question entirely.

"Then he's injured. Let's look at the options: he's either a very dedicated spy, looking for a way into Command, or he's running from certain death. 'Cons are just as likely to kill their own if crossed. Either way, no good for us—especially if the scum that wants him comes looking for him."

"He could be looking for amnesty."

All of them looked up. The mild, even voice came from all around them—though specifically barred from the secondary storage closet, no doubt. Moot was sagacious and sensible like that. Bar frowned up at the ceiling: any squeamishness he'd had with 'not knowing where to look' had dissolved long ago. He had worked with Moot for many stellar-cycles. The two were practically incapable of offending each other, a stalwart respect bracing all of their interactions.

"He doesn't exactly look like a reformer," Bar muttered, leavening his angular body into his navigator's chair with a dirt-choked creak. "But if he's important enough for them to come rooting around, he may have some information that we need."

"Perhaps he is running with a secret," she allowed. "Then again, perhaps he's reaching out to our faction the only way he knows how."

Bar made a flat noise, then said no more. His dark silence heralded an end to their discussion: the scouts, at least, knew how to read him, and still feared him enough to duck out before he could become terse with them for asking in the first place. Both of the younglings glanced back at their equally young leader before they left to their bunks: his vertical form, his severe red plating and thin blue optics. He was sober yet inspiring, but never comforting. Quickstop shuddered as she passed the too-quiet storage closet, and Roller nudged her on. Moot waited until they were gone before gently swiveling her superior's chair toward her softly-lit panels.

"Bar?"

Bar vented a weak bit of air, optics flickering offline. His energon reserves were low, made worse by the full-body rev of panic they all experienced when the 'Con stumbled in. Madness. He would need to take it easy until the next ration.

"It will be all right. Command is behind us."

"I have a bad feeling about this," he murmured, placing one servo on Moot's steering console. He felt a comforting rumble saturate the ship around him and smiled slightly. Words were trite and Command was far away: he felt the femme behind him, every gear and gasket, and that was all he needed at the moment. The fact that he could count on someone was everything.

So long as they did not waver from their duty, everything would turn out fine.

* * *

He was slumped in the corner. He had been, for megacycles—and that was just for the current solar-cycle. The Decepticon mech's spikes and white brow glowed with a ghastly purity in the shadows of the storage closet. He had been dumped and apparently forgotten: if not for the (very low-grade) rations they slid through the custom slot, he would have assumed they wanted him to become a piece of furniture on their little carrier. A trophy.

A week in, the lights came on; he shuttered his optics halfway.

"What is your name?"

The clean female voice was the first thing he'd heard since the red one shoved him in. He glared at the ceiling, looking for a speaker.

"Why d'you wanna know?" he grunted. Rousing himself from the clotted, dry silence of his cell, systems slow to warm, he gave the all-around voice a gap-toothed sneer. "Thought it was easier for you 'bots just to stick a faction to it and be done with it."

"Personal, overly-civilized quirk," she deadpanned. "I dislike referring to you as 'the Decepticon'."

"So you wanna get cozy," he said, then paused maliciously, once more looking up at the ceiling with thinned red optics. "Y'know, before you go and induct me, I probably doused one of your buds. Or thirty-two. S'that gonna put a wrench in our relationship?"

He was bored.

It was the first time anyone had spoken to him in solar-cycles, and he leapt at it, aggravating her just because he could. Moot would understand this, in time, when her processor indeed began to 'get cozy' with him without her consent and, worst of all, she began to _understand_ him too well, but at the moment he just seemed like an abrasive aft. Stupid, pugnacious, assumptive, repellent. Classic 'Con grunt.

It was up to her to speak to him. Bar had no inclination (and too much to worry about), and Roller and Quickstop were terrified of him. Hard as it was, she was curious about him. Much like most other 'Bots, she had never had the opportunity to speak to a Decepticon in a closed environment and she craved information concerning how the other side functioned—perhaps alongside glimmers of affirmation that she was doing the right thing in this amoral time of war. But every time she tried to approach him (even limiting her well-spoken tendencies to suit his slurrs) he sat in his corner and shot insults at her, turning every benign comment into a barb about her crew's closely-held beliefs.

Strangely enough, it became obvious that he wasn't needling her about her faction through any sincere want to provoke a dirty truth, or as an opposing force. He just knew what irritated her from the simple lilt of her vocals and therefore wanted her upset--to be able to effect change in his hostile, rigid environment in any small vicious way he could. Finally, after megacycles of doomed, on-off inquiries and huffy retreats, she prized his name from his spiked exostructure like a rusted gear: Lockdown.

He didn't ask hers.

Lockdown, as she now knew him, was cagey. She kept a sensor on him at all times, watching him quietly through the fishbowl lens of her camera as she floated over barren landscapes, Bar at her controls. Locked in a room equipped with only shelves and one berth-sized bench, walled away from light or air-flow, he reminded her of a tortured feral organic, hard black body pumping as he paced the closet end to end. The rhythm of his distractions, it seemed, were both relieving and maddening in turns. The mere press of the walls made him heavy and miserable and the lack of _decision_ aggravated him as much as the basic idea of imprisonment.

It wore him down with devastating speed. Finally, one solar-cycle, the two (Autobot and Decepticon, matter and antimatter) conducted an exchange that wasn't technically a fit of sneers and snarls. Moot only managed it because Lockdown was exhausted: exhausted of having nowhere to move and nothing to do, worn down to a barely-humming shell by his imprisonment. Because all of his arguments were obviously launched for their inflammatory nature, Moot perhaps thought that he was questioning his own beliefs—which made her even more sensitive to his entrapment.

Soon, far too soon, his paces and growling one-armed push-ups became the physical manifestation of inner turmoil over affiliation. She began to pity him. Rational as she was, she began to hope for him. He had not attempted to escape; he had not attempted harm on any member of their crew and ran to them for safety. Safety of ideals. That one solar-cycle where she actually had him pliant and quiet, if crushed, Moot warily extended her first equal word.

"If you... need anything, let me know," she said softly, watching him for the next flare; waiting to have her humble offer spat back as a curse. "If it isn't too extravagant, I may be able to help."

He only looked up with an understandable amount of suspicion, red optics dimmer than usual.

"Take it bein' let outta this Pittish little hotbox is 'extravagant'?" He asked gruffly.

"Beyond," Moot answered, not without some humor. Lockdown snorted, then leaned back again, giving his lethal frame entirely to the cold wall with a dull rumble.

"Thanks, gal."

He could be charming, she found out, when he wanted to be. She liked his vocals.

Bar was grateful to her for 'loosening' him up, but she could see he disapproved of her continuing to speak with their charge, even if he respected her enough to let her make her own decisions. Perhaps it was for good reason: not another week went by but she found she actually wanted to let Lockdown out. Let him walk around, for the vice of his prison had bled his violence away. He was a tightly-wound mech, knotted with tension: he needed to stretch his flexors. When asked (with all the proper conscientious mentionings of stasis cuffs and inhibitors) Bar gave her a stern, wary look and said solitary confinement never damaged anyone. He was right; she quieted, cowed by her leader's sterile silence, and focused on navigating the ash-grey skies of the strange planet.

It was finalized. Under no circumstances could she give Lockdown the thing he currently wanted most. His mangled arm, on the other hand, was something she could work with.


	26. To Learn, Grow and Love

A/N: OKAYSO. I didn't intend for this to be melodramatic, because melodramatic screams 'Sue', but just… I imagine Torque as a slave to the human (sentient?) condition. She can't resist hooking, much like me, and that gets her in loads of trouble. I'm sure all you hopeless emotional-ists out there will empathize. ... Maybe a little too much, owing to your condition XD Lawl.

(Also, I yoinked the 'holy text' from Teletraan. IT EXISTS I TELLS YOU.)

* * *

To Learn, Grow and Love

* * *

Few things in Prowl's life were awkward.

Repellant, yes; uncomfortable, often. But 'awkward' (that creaking, squirming yet oh-so mild word) required a certain measure of accepted social standards to be valid, all of which had been tossed to the wind since they began their business venture. The two hunters were to the point where grunts were an entirely acceptable, three-dimensional method of communication; connotation consisted of grunt-accompanying gestures. Not only that, he hadn't been 'social' with someone in quite some time, so Prowl supposed his definition of awkward had changed a bit in the past century. Everything was up for interpretation these days.

However: his partner stomping out of the bridge without an ounce of subtlety, leaving him alone with an eccentric, feline antique who eyed him over her data-pad as though he was her next meal? Most definitely awkward.

Just from the door-slamming gait of the retreating mech, it was obvious Lockdown had put up a roaring fit to prevent it. He didn't want to leave the two alone for shady reasons (which Prowl was beginning to fear), but whatever battle had gone on behind closed doors, Torque had obviously won. This victory gave her leave to ignore his exhibitionist rage and settle her small form in Lockdown's colossal navigator chair with many a liquid leg-lift and squirm-shift. Thus entrenched, she leaned back and pretended to study her own blood-red data-pad.

Why pretend? Her yellow optics continually drifted back to him. Pointedly. Very, very pointedly. More than that, she did not look away when he glanced up. Prowl refreshed his vocals and ducked his head, hesitantly flipping through articles. _Awkward_.

They sat in silence for ten yet-more-awkward cycles before he realized she was waiting for him to talk to her. That put yet another kink in his processor. He had spent the last few solar-cycles observing her from a distance, as was his wont, trying to decode (with a humble amount of envious discomfort) the mangled, well-established cipher of smirks and allusions that passed between her and his partner, but he thought the day where he would have to _communicate_ with her (him, still?) was rather far off.

Still, he was curious. It was much like coming face to face with a myth: unfortunately, few knew what to say to myths, as nebulous and fantastical as they are, even if Torque was obviously some grinning rebel breed of myth. She simply didn't seem to… apply to his sphere of reality, even as she curled in Lockdown's chair right in front of him. For cycles, glancing up every so often, Prowl attempted to produce something to say—something, perhaps, poignant and worthwhile--but in the end he could only blurt out the obvious.

"You are… ancient."

Torque flipped the data-pad down far too readily, optics already glowing. Then she frowned at him, short and shallow, as though that _certainly_ wasn't the first thing she'd expected from him (especially when she had her legs propped up at such a minxy angle!).

"Rude!" she huffed, then resettled into Lockdown's oversized chair almost petulantly. "You're never going to get into my chassis that way."

Completely vaulting the sexual potshot (with a greased ease that she would learn was only natural for strange, oblivious little Prowl), the ninjabot shook his head earnestly.

"No—no, I mean that in the best possible sense. You have been… a long time in function. You have seen and felt more than anyone. I respect that with all of me," he insisted softly, then waited a moment. His visor bent. "How have you survived?"

Prowl realized the depth of his question (unwarranted, after only thirty-five murderously awkward cycles alone with her) a moment too late. His solar-cycles of expectation, when combined with his efficient personality, had trumped his sensibility. Fortunately, even in the mounting silence, Torque didn't seem to be upset with him.

"What an interesting question," she sighed after a moment—because he wasn't speaking of skill or avoidance of danger, but simple longevity. He wondered why her Spark had not gone out after all this time; simply puffed into dark space air whence it came.

No one had asked her such in eons. The youngling certainly got to the point, didn't he? She thought about his question, choosing her words carefully.

"At times… it is nothing but survival. Other times—these times—it is living. The line is a thin one, and depends on the amount of distractions I can present to myself," she said softly, then gave him a smile just as downy. "Much like you, you interesting young thing. I'm simply grateful that I met you at such a time in my life where I can appreciate you."

"I apologize, but… what do you mean?" he asked, setting his data-pad aside. She shrugged stiffly.

"When you want nothing more than to go offline, people and relationships aren't really an issue. I'm in a good phase right now. A happy phase. Thus, I can appreciate you."

Half-startled by her steady, matter-of-fact tone—or her simple cycle-based science of existence—Prowl frowned. Then, conscientiously weighing her reactions to his previous questions, he dared to murmur:

"This… happy phase. When did it begin?"

"When I met Lockdown, I suppose. He brought me out what could have been a very bad situation," she answered, nodding to herself, then grinned at Prowl. "Not through any good intentions on his part, of course. Entirely inadvertent. Still, I returned the favor later."

"And before?"

Torque looked away, and Prowl knew he had asked too much in too few words. The curled femme gazed up at the ceiling, then out at the stars, absently petting her data-pad with a conflicted expression. Right before Prowl could carefully, surgically retract the question and duck from the offense of this burdened creature, she answered him.

"I suppose I can't lay full claim to my age. Billions of stellar-cycles and all that, considering where I spent half of it," she began wearily, optics fixed on the red-glazed stars outside the ship. She shook her head. "I became exhausted many, many times. The… first time they left me…"

The last of her family and friends. The first time it happened, she thought it would be the end of her. Now, after so long, it was a _never_-ending rotation of 'they'. Her life, her loves. One simple, fragile, horribly vague word, encapsulating a thousand faces and hundred times as many endearing words: all somehow fated to flicker out far before herself and leave her with a smoke silhouette and another inimitable, eternal ache. Always 'they'. She refreshed her vocals.

"I did what everyone does. I ran."

Torque spoke, quietly, rhythmically unraveling the course of her existence into Prowl's reverent, humming silence. When confronted with utter loss, trapped in a body she did not want, she retreated to an organic planet and locked herself into a stasis so deep that civilizations rose and fell around her. Sinking from reality beside mud-covered creatures arguing over how to kill a beast, she rebooted to the same scenario—save for the argument was conducted over long-eroded piles of corrugated steel and gutted mechanical beings. A thousand courses of a thousand lives, both empty and full, had passed above her while she slept; so deep in the smothering soil, she felt none of it. She assumed there was nothing left to feel. She was wrong.

Cycling through life, death never becomes any easier and love is never so passé. No matter how beaten her body was, emotions rose just as pitiless and precise as the first instant she experienced them. So maddening, to continue to _feel_ so cleanly, so completely while her other faculties—hope, confidence, courage—decayed and dripped into her innards, soiling and spoiling. The lure of a full life dangled and hooked deep, tearing something new (with a spray of hot fluid, a gush of the bitterest regret) each time it retreated. Many, many times, she tried to fade from existence.

Prowl's young Spark shuddered under the tangible weight of so many millennia. He could sense something in her before, a slow-burning yet unimaginably strong golden comfort. He could only guess it was her Spark, radiating its endless stellar-cycles. Its love, its knowledge; its pain. If the holy words held true--if their race was truly in existence to learn, grow and love, then return to the source to share their knowledge with the whole--surely the Allspark would weep upon receiving her glimmering, time-swollen star. Surely, the unfathomable, yawning universe would shudder for a bare moment, and everywhere she had touched would thrill underneath her passing.

Back in the pristine, compact present, Torque sighed.

"I never had the cowardice or… the courage to end it. I ran again and again, into the ground, trying to simply _stop_, but something in me couldn't be quieted. A thousand stellar-cycles, ten-thousand, it didn't matter. I was never woken: I woke myself. Always," she nearly whispered, vocals carefully blank. She did not look at him, optics still on the stars—tracing however many she had visited in the echoing course of her life. After all this time, she could still look at them with reverence. "I've learned this is simply the best way to be.

"What way?" Prowl whispered.

"The way of being," she said, and turned to smile at him.

The way of existing, consciously, as avoiding life often brings far more pain than living it and failing. In her words, Prowl found the truth that had kept her sane for one billion years: no matter how long our lives may last, we are here to live.

Her way of life made sense, then. Lockdown took up bounty hunting for a variety of reasons, most of them to do with prickly independence and lack of responsibility and modifications… but perhaps the only way Torque survived was by bounty hunting: in it, she could be detached from the universe, every conflict anonymous. Play witness only to piecemeal lives with no ensnaring continuity. She was able to _live_ this way, whereas if she were plunged into the thick of a culture, with family and friends and rich lives to treasure, allegiances to mourn, thick ropes of loyalty plunged and fused to the tender shell of her chamber only to be ripped out at the next war—she would go insane.

Though he did not know it, Torque tried it. The first however-many stellar-cycles (_cycles, turns, phases_) of her life, she submersed herself in a bid to purge her older sorrows. The chain of vicious floods and droughts permanently damaged her. Since then, she had learned to live in the shadows and didn't care to be known—but never refused love when it came to her.

Prowl turned his optics to her stars, nearly stalling with the horror and glory of her existence. It was too much to process; should he have asked? Cowed by her tone, he was wary of the repercussions of evoking such a painful story from her, but when he looked up, she met him with a ready expression—that of a fighter. He relaxed slightly, and she smirked at the closed shop door, bringing his personal hemmed-in reality sliding back.

"Every so often, I find people. You can guess that my standards are idiotically high after all this time, so I don't… socialize much. Lockdown, however, is my favorite. He must be tricked into any sort of relationship. He is an easy 'bot to meet, a hard one to _know_…" Torque looked at him appreciatively, her lemon-yellow natural sparkle already returning as she continued: "But I would say you're through the thick of it, little one. Just know: you are quite special."

"I am realizing that more and more," Prowl answered, without a trace of ego: merely reverence for his condition and his unique fortune. She seemed impressed and pleased with his response, and gave him a warm look, which he accepted with an uncertain smile. All of the circumstances packed so tightly around them, the ship to the stars to the closed shop door to her own seat, seemed to line up in some holy arrangement, igniting a curling smile on her face.

"Now, this is exciting," she chuckled, swinging her legs for a moment—chipper, as though she hadn't just spilled the redolent vapors of her Spark to him.

"What, madam?"

"Oh please, not that," she nearly gagged. She flicked her digits at him. "Call me by name. We all have one, they're there for a reason."

Prowl nodded uncertainly, and waited for her to pick up her runaway train of thought. He was not disappointed.

"Sweet _Spark_, this is exciting."

"I am afraid I do not follow." Prowl bit into her luring silence with a small smile. Data-pad propped up again, she looked at him as though shocked he didn't _know_.

"You, here. Him, in there! The both of you. He's still going strong, the pugnacious aft, but give it another century or two and I bet you'll get through to him," she went on, pausing only at Prowl's politely befuddled expression. She sighed, pointing at him. "You see, beforehand, I knew I couldn't standardize the 'bot by myself. He's too much of a mess: lost case. Macho mech's had too many stellar-cycles of doing exactly what he wants without anybody else to scuff his skidplates him every once in a while. _Impossible_."

She smiled at Prowl indulgently, finishing with a touch of sweet mystery:

"But between the two of us, we may just manage it."

"Standardize… Lockdown," Prowl clarified wryly. His tone was enough: in two loaded words, it referenced and redefined the bristly, snarling mech who had shut himself in his shop and was currently hacking and wailing away with his chainsaw _just_ to blot out the details, much less the idea, of their conversation. Torque chuckled deeply.

"Touché, Prowler," she conceded, and that, too, was enough for the two of them. She refreshed her pad and took a stylus to the scuffed surface, scribbling away. Prowl smiled quickly, blindsided by the name. His Spark pulsed gladly.

For the next megacycle, they sat in fresh, comfortable silence, each going about their respective dabbling alongside the walled-out stars. Prowl returned to his articles. From the clipped, familiar noises Torque's pad emitted, the young mech would have guessed she was prowling the Feed again. Looking for more marks. Their next stop was the B-level planet where her ship was being repaired: after all, she had drawled when asked, she didn't always rely on the growling, hostile kindness of acquaintances--though hitchhiking was always an option. Startled, Prowl had looked away with the utmost of bemused determination when she mused almost _hopefully_ about the chances of being taken advantage of when hitchhiking, a poor lone femme like herself, and eyed the young, virile ninjabot (as he would learn) playfully.

Yes, it would certainly take a while to get used to her, but Prowl was looking forward to the journey; curiosity would act as his fuel. Even sitting with another (so very agreeable) 'bot in this manner was unexpectedly pleasing; it warmed his Spark to do so. It had been a long time since casual company was an option, and he should have been able to enjoy the novelty with ease… but a thought had wormed into his processor. It was an alarming, relatively old thought that chose that peaceful moment to surface, and caused Prowl's freshly-happy Spark to dim slightly—all provoked by Torque's time-rich, untapped knowledge of his partner.

Prowl would not have been so forward with her during their very first talk, but the way she connected with him so effortlessly, entrusting him with some of her story, swayed him. Moreso, with the way Lockdown spoke of her, there was a good chance she would pack up and disappear for another century or two, like a star winking out. It was small change for her, but eons for Prowl, and he couldn't stand to sit on his sad curiosity for another lifetime. He had already kept his peace for seventy-some stellar-cycles, even with heavy reminders—shy electric whispers—at his cheek more often than he cared to count.

"Torque?" he asked softly, using her name for the first time. She hmm-ed attentively, watching him. "Do you… may I ask you something?"

"You've already technically asked me how old I am: I think anything is fair game at this point," she said dryly. He smiled somewhat, but not entirely.

"It isn't so personal, precisely," he began, then paused. He condensed the worry of decades and a single, violent solar-cycle and reached out to touch Moot's wall. "Do you know about… this ship?"

Torque's ready expression fell. He could nearly hear the crash.

There was no hiccup of interpretation. There was no juxtaposition of technical and mechanical statistics for a literal definition. She knew exactly what he was talking about, and he thrilled (vindicated) to see the clarity of emotion on her face; her simple acknowledgement of the feel of a 'bot with whom all was not—had never been—right. Torque had, in some way, felt her flutter and her thermal rhythm, perhaps a tendril of sentient effort. She _knew_ about Moot.

The two hunters exchanged a quick volley of emotions: surprise, anxiety, beaten curiosity. The cumulative blow knocked Torque's gaze down to the floor again. Prowl's Spark leapt at a common admittance. It was half-agonizing, for this to be so exceptional: the pure fact that a problem _existed_ and they both acknowledged it with aching honesty instead of snuffing it with a sneering growl and a pulled punch. The chance to _know_ was a lure as heavy as iron, but whether her knowledge included what had gone on between Lockdown and the shy carrier countless stellar-cycles ago was to be decided. Torque vented a tense bit of air and tried to gather herself, Prowl's blue visor hot on her.

"No, honey. I don't." she said finally. She looked up; her stricken face mirrored the sharp clench in Prowl's own chassis. "Even if I did, it's not my place to say so. I can't tell you anything he hasn't decided to tell you. It wouldn't be right."

"He did not purchase her," Prowl said, surprised at the vehemence in his vocals after languishing so long in silence. She shook her head, because they both knew there could have been money involved. Lockdown operated in selective truths.

"Don't ask. For both of your sakes, leave it be," she said quietly. She rose from her—Lockdown's—chair and came over to where Prowl sat. Half-stunned, he drew back when she went down to her knees beside him and touched his armored shoulder, looking into his angled visor. "Lockdown was a different creature in the beginning of his life. He cared nothing for others. He's done many things, half of them to survive, the other half to thrive. Both were wicked in their own way, but he's gotten better."

Old, cultured suspicion flowing hot in his tubing, agonized by the mute suffering of the re-realized _being_ beneath him and around him—the only thing he was certain of in this mysterious tangle--Prowl tried to speak. Torque's digits tightened on him; a frown and a tense pulse from her ancient center sucked him dry.

"I said _better_," she murmured. Her grip loosened, then drifted up to brush his sharp jawline. She sighed, gazing at him hazily. "I know the feel of this ship. Known it from the beginning, poor thing. You can ignore it, but… it's gotten worse, hasn't it?"

Prowl nodded stiffly. Moot had not stirred in so long, firefly life dwindling underneath his sad negligence, but he did not trust himself to speak of how she had been for those precious few months. Torque sighed again.

"I know. It's very sad… but it's also over. She's gone. Please let it be, Prowl."

She pushed herself to her pedes, then ran her digits over his golden horns, pressing softly.

"This must seem very far-fetched to you—not enough to justify her state—but the simple fact that that impossible mech is with you is proof enough of how he has changed," she said when he looked up at her. "A millennia ago, he would never have considered allowing anyone into his ship, let alone his berth."

"This is not about me," Prowl insisted, tone cold with glaring suspicion; Torque's sad face could be hiding—protecting, falsifying—so very much, just to keep him quiet. Sides could be taken, truths denied.

"But it is," she responded, looking intently into his visor. "Because we're here now. How long… did he know you before he made his offer?"

Prowl stilled, memory core flaring with that black, far-off time. Strangers. Surgeries. Escape from the battle-scarred Earth. Survival. His visor dimmed.

"Seven stellar-cycles," he managed.

She smiled, small and strange. Disconnected.

"Do you know how long I chased your partner?" She asked softly. Prowl shook his head. "Fifty stellar-cycles. I chased him because I wanted to maim him into non-operation, yes, but he still shut me out for another century, and yet another after that. And he has always been like this—until you."

Her servo was at his cheek again, and this time he leaned into it, seventy exhausting stellar-cycles of concealed stress and suspicion weighing him down into her steady warmth. She looked at him so tenderly—so truly, she would never deny him anything—that his Spark nearly quivered.

"I hardly know you, darling, though I'd like to…but I believe Lockdown needs you. He may have started out simply wanting you, but now he needs you. You and your faith."

"Something horrific happened to her," Prowl whispered weakly. It was almost as though the gigantic ghost had risen all around him, pressing in at the sound of her story. Her scarred, grasping presence pained him to his core. Even having another 'bot to speak to about it was overwhelming, nearly nerve-wracking. "She hates and fears him."

"I don't know why. Neither… am I saying that whatever he did was acceptable in any stretch of the word." Her vocals were heavy, but she did not look away from his sad gaze. She continued, whispering, "I'm saying 'bots should be rewarded for their changes. Patient as you may be, Lockdown has done much to keep you with him. He has… tried. He has changed. I can feel it as strongly as you feel this ship, Prowl—the only difference is, one is over and the other has just begun. I beg you, don't throw that fact away for an ages-old deed—perhaps even an ages-old mistake. We are the sum of our progressions, and, in his own way, your partner has come farther than most I've had the privilege of knowing. Remember that."

Prowl's visor thinned, optics lowering to his lap. She smiled, sparse but true, and left the young mech alone with his thoughts, his wounded faith and his never-forgotten friend—and one very important decision.

He sat, simply staring at the stars. Her stars, in a way. When Lockdown walked into the bridge several blurry, difficult megacycles later, shooting his partner a wary, hunted glare (intruding into a room where two enemies had been left to confer over their mark), Prowl looked away, then nodded at him tentatively. Lockdown, after a heavy moment, nodded back.

"What'd she tell you?" He muttered, optics on the hangar.

"Nothing you wouldn't have," Prowl said softly, as it was true. When Lockdown snorted (affable, relieved) and smiled a real smile, warm red optics flaring briefly, Prowl knew he would manage to look beyond what lay behind them.

The slow trek forward (potholes and small smirks, baby steps for a barbed, iron-shielded monster) had never been put in perspective before. Now, given Torque's words, he had too much to lose by looking back or ripping into things already finished and scarred over. Moot, ethereal and sad, was gone. Perhaps Prowl could lay the silent, burdened femme to rest in some small way by accepting her passing, but, for better or worse, he could never alienate Lockdown for his past deeds. Never would he be a stranger.

All that was left was to continue: to learn, grow and love by his partner's side, as Primus would have it. His only hope was that Lockdown would follow in his tracks as starry stellar-cycles ticked by and this hard bit of faith would bear something greater. They had, after all, come so very far together.

Together.


	27. Stranded

A/N: Oh, these poor little characters. Can we say 'Con fodder'?

Also, I'd LOVE to thank Kookaburra, Gloria Stone, EKP and LightSorceress for taking the effort to say something and keep me afloat these past few weeks :3 I really, really appreciate it more than you know (especially LightSorceress, you delightfully wordy thing! XD). You have no idea how much I look forward to hearing back about this story from you all. Oh, and Gloria: I'd love to detail their 'first time', but I realized it would not be a happy thing D: Prowl's in a happy place right now, and I don't want to drag him back—and there's smut tucked in-between these chapters, promise!

In fact, there's one coming up within the next update, if you all continue to be very good even _after_ Christmas… XD (Reviewhinthint!)

* * *

Stranded

* * *

"The captain of the tugboat."

The red Autobot stood at the vista, a grey, pronged contraption in his servos. After dumping the heavy mech on the floor in the middle of the bridge with an uncomfortable clang, the rest of the 'bots (just _two_, such a bite-sized, primary-colored ship crew for one used to a throng of dark-plated siege-machines) shuffled out, just as nervous as they had come in. The captured mech twisted into a sitting position, never straining at the stasis cuffs.

"Thanks for the hospitality, Autobot. Y'know, I'd heard rumors, but I never really believed you folks actually patched up prisoners'a war," the Decepticon drawled impudently, and left it at that—as though, even as he enjoyed a newly-repaired arm with limited dexterity, he couldn't swallow the flagrant stupidity of their Autobot code. At the door to their quarters, the femme glanced back with wide baby-blue optics, flinching when Lockdown twisted to smirk at her. Bar looked back just in time to see him chase her out of the room with his optics, then lean back with a wider grin.

"That femme got a degree in anything asides patchin'?"

Typical 'Con.

Being trapped in the suffocating, dark storage closet with the monster had scared Quickstop beyond words, even if he was half-sedated by the buzzing stasis cuffs. Even so demolished, he still managed to grin at her (the expression was heavy and distorted, like he was overcharged), which sent tremors scurrying up and down her struts as she picked and soldered at his shoulder joint, where all of the wiring had been ripped out of place. It was a rudimentary patch job, but having him so _close_, smelling and feeling like he did with that dense, oily dark Spark roaring away inside him, like a heavy black weight about to tip over and crush her… it nearly forced her into hysterics. Bar could only frown at Quickstop for several reasons when she fled into Roller's arms afterwards, shaking madly.

"Do you think I had you brought here to talk at me, 'Con?" Bar asked blankly. The red-plated mech did not look up from his work as he carefully paced the vista, attentively (pointedly) adjusting the contraption in his servos.

"Nope," Lockdown grunted, watching his busy digits. "Just figure, a little chattin' beforehand tends to loosen up interrogators' bolts."

"Consider me loosened," Bar hissed, not liking the Con's easy tone. He stepped forward, away from the grey-brown landscape where they had stopped to rest, and leveled the machine in the Decepticon's black-marked face. "What do you know?"

It was quick, but neither figured the other to be one for small-talk. Lockdown had the nerve to chuckle, leering at Bar from thinned crimson optics.

"What do I know?" He snorted. "I'm a grunt."

"A grunt," Bar repeated. An invisible tremor went down his arm and into the poised machine.

"Protoformed and programmed," the 'Con said, a touch too gleefully, and looked at the stoic Autobot like he was the thickest creature alive. A look like that (that implication, fat with condescension) would have earned him a fist through his chamber plating in the Decepticon camps—but he was with the Autobots, now. The clean, controlled, pious Autobots.

Unfortunately, Bar had already been pushed too far.

He was not the same 'bot who had shoved their charge into his prison. Even Lockdown, who had encountered him but once before, noticed the tense acridity in his stance; the ready blue flare in his optics. His leader-like rigidity had turned brittle in the span since they had taken the dissenter into custody. And now, the 'Con's nonchalance and striding absence of fear inflamed him, feeding the ugly frustration that took root with letting the scum on board—saving him from his own, in effect, which only took Bar a scant few weeks to regret.

But it had been far longer than a few weeks. They had reached two months, and things were not right. A sudden electrical storm had brought Moot to the ground in a half-megacycle of hissing, screaming panic and decimated her navigational equipment; Quickstop was able to reconnect her instruments, but they were hopelessly off mark, blown by the surges. Optionless, they wandered over the rocky planet, searching for familiar territory as their energon stores dwindled: they were in the middle of nowhere, on the fringes of battle, and, above all, they had an enemy on their ship—an enemy who could not know of their situation. But it was as though every cycle and megacycle wasted coasting over featureless ground after that one symbolic crash (nothing but a nauseating full-body heave in the dark for the Con) whispered of their lack of control. Perhaps it was that which gave the Con his grin. His impudence.

Perhaps, also, it was the fact this ugly mech was speaking the truth. He had no information, which meant he was nothing but a liability. More and more, Bar was feeling taken advantage of in the most abhorrent of ways: that their small capture-victory had turned into protection of an infidel. For the first time in many difficult stellar-cycles, Bar was genuinely angry and stranded without options—and the Con needed to know who was in control. He needed to be reminded that he was in enemy territory, and fear was the most advisable state.

The Autobot leader let his outstretched arm drop to his side, looking away from Lockdown, then clenched the machine in his fist and slashed the smirking mech across the face with it. Angry surges of hot, raw electricity dug in and stung deep as the electrodes on the shocker flared to life with a sizzle. The Con grunted, face smacked to the side. His profile twitched in the bright light of day as the last of the seething sparks snapped off into the air, then his fuzzy red optics found Bar—stoic, staring--again.

"And y'said you were loosened?"

His groan (stuffy and annoyed) set the other mech off. Blue optics flaring, the red-plated mech lunged forward and forced him to the ground, burying the shocker into his side, again and again. He dug it in so brutally that paint peeled up, leaving the sizzling tips to scar naked metal. Each time, the Decepticon hissed or gagged or snarled, white head snapping back as the pain punched through his substructure, shooting acid agony down his connective structures.

It only lasted a cycle (ending with one close-held gouge that lasted for fifteen vicious, convulsive kliks, watching the Con's optics blink and short out as a burning smell filled the air in front of his face) but it was enough. When Bar finished and pushed himself to his pedes, fans chugging unsteadily and pistons slamming back and forth in a sharp, clean panic, the brute shifted to a groaning standstill. Bar could hear the stunned hum of his core, like an insect caught in a zapper. Then Lockdown onlined one optic and muttered out of the corner of his wide mouth:

"That ain't… like you, bud. Don't think I'm the only one who noticed, either."

Half numb, he watched the battered Decepticon aspirate gingerly for a klik, then looked over to find wide blue optics waiting for him at the door to his crew's quarters. The sizzle of his direct glare (unintentional, nothing more than a feral spillover from the hateful clench of his every part) caused Quickstop to disappear with a faint sound, but Roller looked for a moment more. Long enough for Bar to see the fear in his face.

Viscous shame replaced the heady burn of hatred. The suffocating feeling weighed his every limb, pressing at his tired Spark, but it was laced with a new, slower fury: that of being lured out. The scum had schemed to bring out his viciousness purposefully, and he had hooked. More than that, the 'Con couldn't know what he was like, but seemed to consider himself qualified enough to make assumptions anyways. His Spark rebelled, and the rage showed on his angular face and in the crackle of the shocker's covering as his fist tightened.

This was a mistake. He never should have let the villain out of his cell.

"War sure brings out the best in us, dudnit?" Lockdown rasped merrily, flat on the floor. He was still smoking faintly. Still twitching. Bar brusquely holstered the shocker at his hip and went to his knees beside the sprawled mech, pressing one cold servo on Lockdown's black chassis--right above the steady pulse of polluted energy. Lockdown stilled and eyed him with a respectable amount of wariness, internals clicking away.

"What's to stop me from dousing you? Right now?"

Lockdown laughed. Bar plugged the grating sound by pressing down viciously, nearly denting the Con's scuffed exostructure into his chamber plating. Lockdown's ventilation backed up and he coughed briefly.

"Pit, what's _not_ to stop you? You Autobots are too pure-Sparked to dirty your servos with pullin' plugs," he sneered, looking directly into Bar's blazing blue optics with another grungy, electricity-burned chuckle. A challenge. "You wanna _help_ everyone, even the Rebellion. Help 'em right into their slaggin' coffins. With what I did? This is the safest place I could be."

Another nod to his deed—nebulous, goading, _promising_—caused Bar, thrilling with hatred, to press down harder and dig his reinforced digit-tips into the relatively soft metal. Dark metal squealed; Lockdown snarled, Spark flaring.

"_What do you know, scum_?"

"I know enough to figure somethin' don't add up here," he huffed quickly, holding perfectly still; regardless, Bar's digits sunk in deeper and Lockdown groaned, short and sharp. He shook his head. "Seems like somethin' ain't right, and you're flailin' because of it. I know how this works, and if we were flyin' proper, I'd already be in a cell. What's the deal, captain? We takin' the scenic route?"

"I'm not required to answer a deserter," Bar retorted roughly, but he made the mistake of wrenching his servo free and standing up, sick as he was of cycling the Con's dirty, oil-scented fumes into his clean insides. The proximity had left him feeling grime-coated and half sick, but that had more to do with nauseating nervousness that came from the mech's words. Bar's control slipped another precious notch. When he turned back and glared downward, his captive was still on his back but was looking at him evenly, dim optics lit only by a coarse interest.

"I know what's up," he growled slowly, watching the other mech; Bar tensed, engine rumbling. There was an expansion in the Con's voice: the bloom of a realization or an evil invisible smile. "You've been cut off. Probably haven't heard from the big bolts in weeks. You're _lost_."

It was true. They were lost and had not received word from Command in all two months of their wandering. Silence, silence, not even static. A part of their world had dropped from underneath their pedes. They were to be forgotten, and the mood on the ship reflected it: a rising, choking grasping anxiety. Without Command, they were nothing. And now the Con knew.

Lockdown smirked again, but not in hatred, nor in pleasure. Never in hatred, because without his own prejudice clouding his functions, Bar had the disturbing feeling that this grizzled 'Con did not hate him in the least, by any hissing default programming of allegiances, but judged him solely on his actions in the moment. His captive made a sound somewhere between a groan and a chuckle, still impossibly, starkly amused… perhaps at the idea of allegiances in general. Perhaps at the idea of sacrifice or service; of personal risk for a greater cause.

"They forget you, kid? Wander too far behind 'Con lines to bother fetchin'?"

"I will not have my allegiance insulted: speak so again and I will put you into forced stasis," Bar answered sharply, crossing his arms. "One wonders how you can be so unconcerned when they're out for your plating as well."

Lockdown just chuckled again and shook his beastly head. The reminder wasn't a shock to him: he'd had far too long to get used to the idea of his own side hunting him. Instead, he studied the Autobot leader for a good, long moment before speaking.

"Tell me somethin', and I'll mute it, n'you can lock me back in my box," Lockdown rumbled thickly. "You doin' this for me, or you doin' this for you?"

When Bar glared at him uncomprehendingly, Lockdown drawled on:

"Cause you're puttin' on a pretty big show here, with your buzzer and your threats and all, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who realizes this is a carrier and you 'bots are grunts. Just like me."

_Which means you don't know anything either_.

He had realized they had no proper instruments; no proper interrogation room. But of course he would: he was from the savagery that was the Rebellion. Torture equipment was standard issue and interrogation used in place of casual inquiry. He would notice when terror was not properly executed, but this was not their trade. They weren't even equipped to take prisoners.

The mech's sharp, evilly colored optics lingered on the device at his hip, as though he knew it was nothing but a jump-starter with the wiring exposed. _Sad_, he could hear the 'Con huffing with an abusive half-grin. _That's just sad_.

But it was the truth, which made it even worse.

"You ain't programmed for this. You be straight with me and I won't pull you around. Turn me over to the big bolts. Then I'll sing and you'll get your dues," Lockdown muttered, sounding nearly as exhausted as Bar, in his own way. He wanted the show to be over with—and a sadistic show it was, Bar realized with a stunned flicker of his Spark. He looked to the side.

"Fer now, just focus on tryin' to keep us afloat. We're all in the same ship now, Autobot. Can't blow the hull just to sink me."

It was true in so many ways. The 'Con operated in truths: a weapon often the cutting opposite of faith in war. It was too much to have him near, grinning in his fulfilled—vindicated—way as his team's façade dissolved into the unprepared carrier-drones they were, and Bar's control slipped through his servos.

So Bar, in that stricken, zero-gravity moment, considered killing him. If not driving a gun nozzle into his ugly Spark, then heaving him out of their carrier at atmospheric level. Leaving him to crash amongst the rocks and quiet his dirty, destructive truths. Be rid of him.

But even as he thought it, he knew he couldn't sacrifice his morals—that treasured, steadying part of himself, his ideological backstruts—just to rid himself of the creature. Couldn't blow the hull just to sink him. Bar stiffened, clenched his fists, then tore the shocker off his hip and flung it to some dark corner.

Lockdown's wounded grin followed him out.

* * *

She had processed this. Perhaps it was just something to keep her processor off of the weight she seemed to be accumulating as they dragged through the acidic grey atmosphere, but Moot had thought long and hard about how to phrase it.

_What crime did you commit? Who did you put offline? _

"What… did you do, if I may ask?"

He—sharp, even after so many solar-cycles in faculty-dulling captivity—probably saw through the stale, ambiguity-glossed phrasing immediately. Instead of mocking her for it, he rolled over onto his burnt side and groaned slightly.

"Primus, d'you Autobots always get so chatty with your prisoners of war? F'you don't watch it, you're gonna take a shine to me."

"That would never do," she responded dryly. "I don't believe I'm programmed to fraternize."

He snorted appreciatively, and the sound somehow calmed her; tightened up the fraying fabric of her sentient health that had suffered so much wear the past two months. Also, there was a strange, small, secret thrill of being able to talk to him like this. The crew, her friends and strangers, were quickly knotting up in the tension left by silence from Command. They didn't know where they were. Moot felt as though they were sinking, in a horribly complete way: one that could only be identified as 'being forgotten'. They stalled and froze and teetered on the edge of despair only to violently stumble backwards into faith or denial, saturated with a cold exposed feeling. Simply waiting until the enemy sea swallowed them. It was their worst fear, but they had to stick it out, even if energon supplies were getting dangerously low. Their allegiance demanded it of them.

But there was their prisoner, snug and nonchalant inside his cell—nothing to do but recharge and pace occasionally. It drove him insane in its own way, of course, but it was a better alternative than wild, destructive vigilance. He and Moot seemed to reach an even ground of novelty with one another that concocted an impossible, pleasing elixir of casualness. Friends, if one enemy could befriend another, but Moot knew—even if she didn't feel--that was not an option.

Moot beeped and chirped patiently, but the silence still seemed to prompt him: well? Lockdown shook his head. He couldn't see anything wrong with giving her the story he had denied their tight-aft leader, and it wouldn't compromise his intel trump card. Besides that, some part of him wanted to talk.

"Got myself and the corporal in a bind. I was tied up, but the big guy was still safe—just below the ridge but with his legs mangled. 'Bots had me at gunpoint. Said they'd gimme a free walk if I handed him over, so I did."

He still didn't know why they didn't just threaten him with death—maybe they just knew the look of 'bots like him. Filthy opportunists, willing to back down without a fight if it meant their skidplates were intact. Then again, the little Autobot pacifists would wage a war with words and back-pats if they had their way: meant less oil on their servos.

"Then the section got hit and everything blew to Pit before I could bolt. Arm took the blunt, and that's when you fine machines came in. S'it."

She could have ground a limb across his tone and suffered a burn, it was so utterly dry and sandpapery. She churned for a moment, hesitant, then said the only thing she could think of.

"Why?"

Why did he do it? Lockdown shrugged.

"Nothin' to gain by takin' one for the team. Did what was best for me. Slagger got out anyways in the rush, no use. Tattled. They've got my serial code."

"But… what of your allegiance?" Moot asked, struggling to understand his tone—his words, his salty egocentricism unaffected by the swirl and pull of _cause_. Her lifeblood.

"Darlin', you dunno the first thing about 'Cons," the mech chuckled thickly: truly amused, with only the faintest twist of acrimony. "Those slaggers are lucky they can mount a defensive, often as they're at each other's wiring. Suspicious as Pit, too, 'least in my section. They'd been waitin' for ages to douse me. Just needed an excuse."

He grunted, squinting briefly at the ceiling.

"Surprised they waited 'till I actually did somethin'."

That shocked her further. Was preemptive murder a common resort on the Decepticon side? Things were worse than she'd even suspected. Moot made a distressed sound, some internal mechanism grinding far from Lockdown's makeshift cell as she struggled to make the facts fit.

"They would even divert forces from their front—just to hunt one of their own?"

"Oil's reward enough for some," he said, and that was it.

Hunting their own was _sport_.

With that concept, Moot finally realized she was operating from a completely different schema: that of a supportive and united front. Perhaps it was his description of his own side that caused her to skew the situation, or to truly, sincerely pity him: cite the cause of his desertion as the Sparkless pressure and cutthroat violence from all sides, and no inner trait of healthy amoral treachery. Lockdown, she saw briefly, the never-meant-to-be Decepticon, who grinned to himself and had her quite dismayed… driven from a toxic environment that caused the errors--not an equally flawed creature reacting to a slagged-up situation in the dirtiest, cleanest way he knew how.

The Autobots were united for a common cause: that of defense and protection. The Decepticons headed a mad, oil-slick rush for power, fragmented. Those fragments gouged inwards, only infuriating the fighters to a frenzy. How they gained power, morale, she had no idea. It was so… destructive. Each officer ready to turn on the other. Anyone of healthy connective circuitry would fight to get free. She vented a gusty bit of air.

"The Autobots would never do such a thing."

"Wouldn't say that like you know it. Yer boss is a regular fried little fragger," Lockdown grunted. "Think he'd find a lot to do with a plasma canon and a line-up of 'bots."

Then he rolled over and shut up, and she knew from the unyielding silence that he didn't want to talk any further. She should have been surprised that she had exacted so much out of him, because this—Autobots, Decepticons, the war—was over for him. From the way he spoke to his opinions, it was simply… gone.

But how could it be over when it was still around him, raging, pressing in?

* * *

She was encircled.

"Take it up into the atmosphere, we might lose them in the cloud coverage!"

Battered mechanics groaning, she flew as fast as she could. The hiss of hot engines slithered up to either side of her, housed in dark, angular, screaming mechs; they countered her path and chased her up into space. After punching through the thick wall of clouds, black, crisp cold stretched to all sides, leaving them excruciatingly exposed.

Explosion. A missile grazed her wing. Moot shuddered so hard her lights flashed, hardly muffling a high-pitched cry when another's scalding slipstream bludgeoned her to the side.

Directionless in the void of dead space, she spun wildly.

The ship-wide warning tone, broadcasted from her screaming core, made Lockdown sit up in his cell bare kliks before she spun out. Even so deep in the ship, he heard the wail of chaos and felt the grinding shift as they burst from the atmosphere, then slammed into the wall with an audio-unit-stunning clang as Moot lurched to the side. When she righted, equilibrium chip fritzing alongside his stunned processor, Lockdown wrenched himself back to his pedes and punched the wall of his cell, shouting:

"What the Pit is happening?"

He heard her aspirating; heard her small, frightened noises alongside the ruckus of the crew slam-slam-slamming past his door. She wasn't trying to channel or block her vocal functions from his cell and her energy field quailed, whining and out of control. He banged on the wall, substructure knotting.

"Talk to me, gal, come on!" He roared. It was several tense kliks and a muffled explosion before he got a response.

"We're… we're under attack—"

Another lurching evasive maneuver knocked him into the wall; Lockdown dug his heels in and froze. The natives weren't warlike, nor were they capable of aeronautics. The inevitable had come to pass: the 'Cons had found them. Knowing his kind, they were taking their sweet time picking off the defenseless Autobot straggler. His substructure went cold and tight, but not from the air screaming past Moot's hull, nor the intermittent explosions. Those were just the present threats, pressing in on his hot processor with agonizing proximity, because not only could they be blown to bits, if the 'Cons were thoughtful enough to actually capture the ship, they'd search her and find the Autobots—and him.

After what he did, and who he ran to, being back in Rebel servos would be a fate worse than… there was nothing to compare. He glared up at the ceiling, processor racing.

"Damnit! How many are there? What's your counterattack?"

The vibrating walls crushed in on him (a black box plunged into a well of bludgeoning explosions) as she struggled for far too long, then hissed:

"I can't."

"What the frag do you mean y'can't?!"

She let out another cry and banked sharp left; Lockdown could almost hear the signature shriek of the Decepticon's special-made engines, like a blade passing over his head.

"My navigational and targeting systems are down, I can't register anything that isn't in my primary optical sensors!"

Lockdown didn't curse. The scalding panic was too intense to permit vocalization. Instead, he froze, optics widening even as they flickered.

"Let me out."

"_What_?" Lockdown heard the muffled click of exclusive broadcasting: she was just talking to him now.

"I said let me out!" He shouted, glaring upwards. "You're fragged without your targeting equipment and you know it: y'need all 'bots on deck and you're missin' one! Just open the door! _Now_!"

Technically, he was an enemy, but the situation couldn't get any worse. Maybe, he could help. She was too panicked to ask for details. Not when her life and the lives of everyone she had been charged to protect were on the line. After a tense, hissing moment, the door clicked open with an anguished noise and Lockdown heaved himself out and bolted down the dipping, jolting hall.

"You slaggin' malfunctions couldn't pilot your way out of a garage!" Lockdown snarled, sprinting into the chaotic, red-lit bridge. A short, violent scuffle erupted after the femme jerked around and shrieked, stumbling back into the flashing, shuddering console; her lover-bot gasped and abandoned his station just to equip his turrets and grab her, blue optics wide. Ripping his attention from the controls, their stiff-necked leader looked at him—then _saw_ him and made a shocked, furious sound just short of a snarl, grabbing for his gun.

"What the Pit is he doing out--"

"You need help, we can't do this alone!"

"_Moot_!" Bar roared after a cold moment; his face was distorted with rage and wild shock as he glared upwards, fist clenched. "That was not your call to make!"

Even in all the panic, they felt Moot recoil and condense. Lockdown stepped toward the flunkie and his femme, who pulled away with a startled gasp as the massive, red-lit 'Con rushed him.

"Doesn't matter who made the call," he hissed, pushing Roller away. "What kinduva captain are you? Why the Pit don't you have someone up on top, bein' her optics?"

"You won't take us from within, scum," Bar ground out, engine ripping and roaring. He closed in on his freed captive, pistol raised high and straight, the virulent brilliance of panic and insanity flashing from his thin optics.

"I'm not the 'bot you gotta worry about, kid," Lockdown said. He raised his servos, gravity ripe in his mangled vocals. "You're wastin' time. If we're gonna lose these punks, you gotta move quick and get the big gal covered. Quit standin' around, all'a you factory rejects!"

Roller and Quickstop shuddered as Lockdown pointed at them, rage blazing on his strange white face, but beyond that, no one moved. His offer gestated in the hot, trapped air. Gun raised high, standing no less than a length from the Decepticon, their leader glared at him stonily. Some sort of dense, panic-sharpened calculations ran behind his too-bright optics: time was short. He needed something. Anything.

"What are you?" Bar finally barked out as their world spun out of control, pistol flat against the juggernaut's chassis. Lockdown looked down at him. "Autobot or Decepticon?"

"Neither," he rasped.

"There is no such thing!" Bar snarled.

"There is now," Lockdown responded icily and grabbed the nozzle of the Autobot's pistol and forced it down, moving close to Bar's face and lowering his vocals. "All you gotta know is I need to get away from these shaft-suckers just as much as you. Trust my survival back-up programming if you can't trust me."

He could have been a mole: a plant aboard their ship, to wait until they fell into this trap, then take control so as to let the Cons close in on them. But somehow they knew: he was afraid of death as they were. Bar's grip slackened from the pistol. He let Lockdown tug it away and toss it to the ship floor, then met the monster's red optics. He grit his dentals.

"What do you need us to do?"

"Shut up and drive," Lockdown growled, and disappeared up the main hatch. Staring after him a bare klik, Bar went back to the controls, and they—four Autobots and one Decepticon—began the fight for their lives.

He worked as her site. With his three arachnid arms clamped into her exostructure, negating the chance of getting swept into space, he aimed and took manual control of her canons. Lockdown synced with her comm system and narrated the state of things—comparatively small as he was, dark as he was, they never saw him flat on the hull, but the Cons grew more touchy as the brightly-colored Autobot's waffling panic became something more focused and clipped. Moot swooped and boosted at all the right times.

But they—the Decepticons, their lazy murderers—were running on full. Absorbed (incinerated) in the heat of her exertions and the sick orange cinder-shrapnel from so many missiles, half-thrilling in this combining of forces, Moot didn't notice that one of her canons had been detatched—and she certainly think that she couldn't trust Lockdown any more than she could trust those who were seeking the deaths of her and her wards.

She looked back (a swivel of cameras and internal sensors) when her hatch-chamber opened then depressurized, and the grizzled mech fell from the ceiling, one still-humming canon locked in between the barely-functional digits on his bad arm. The thud of his landing was well-camouflaged in all the chaos and the desperate forward push of all the earnest, _alive_ bots towards their monitors, so no one else looked back. In the cover of survival, the Decepticon (red optics burning) strode behind the young blue Autobot and slammed the blunt of the canon across his head, sending him crashing to the floor with an agonized sizzle.

Quickstop saw it out of the corner of her visual field. She turned and jerked away and drew energy to scream just in time to see her lover roll over with blank optics and have her visual field eclipsed by green-gashed black. Lockdown brought his fist into her tiny gut, denting her clean to her struts, then swiped the momentum-thick canon across her shoulders so hard something cracked. She screamed in pain and tried to struggle past him, crying for Bar. He went for her head. Soon, she joined Roller on the floor.

It happened too fast to register. Within cycles, her entire crew—three precious fighters—were laid out under the black fist of the mech now standing at her controls. Bar was gone. Bar was blank and fizzling on her floor: she could feel his weight, like a sore spot. And Lockdown. She had shouted at him as he drove the sharp javelin tip of the canon into her dear friend's middle and ripped him aside (oil spray in a whimsical arc); she had screamed _what are you doing_ as though he had reasons to give her.

Finally, as the pain-hungry Decepticons closed in around her like a cruel fist, the survival-hungry Lockdown drove his good hand into her control panel like a knife and answered her.

"Makin' you a martyr."

She began to tilt and buck in the black sky. Hysteria consumed her, the unique and intimate weights of her crew and friends like so many bleeding spots inside, skidding and scraping with horrible wet sounds as she rolled. When the traitor's canon—her own canon, stolen—dug into her paneling, she shrieked and thrashed, nearly crashing into one of her pursuers.

Methodically, untiringly, he tore at her with his evil red optics blazing.

"For what cause?" she gasped as her chamber plating—concealed beneath the wire-rich, protected shell of her controls—cracked under Lockdown's hooked servos.

He tore her open. He powered up the hot canon with a vicious whining, whirring sound and thrust it straight into her fluttering center with a spurt of bleeding blue essence. She screamed so loudly her sentience wavered and the world buckled. Lockdown flexed his bad servo.

"My cause."

He fired.

* * *

He rebooted. It was less like coming alive than realizing that he had failed to go offline.

_Suffocating, booming blast. The crash and snarl of two different energies being crushed into one another, then the nearly soundless explosion of the stuff of gods as the world itself lost its lines and matter. A shockwave ripped through the ship—ripped through _her_—sweeping up her walls, blowing all her fine, delicate, tender circuitry and blowing _outwards_. _

_Her deathpulse stretched for a mile. It was the keen of a ravaged Spark, the torturous sound that resounded with any other pulsing being; pushed them into stasis through vicarious, searing trauma. The energy was too much. Forced them into dead, echoing blackness._

_On the inside, cupped inside her agonized red walls, time stopped. Reality swirled, fabric drawn in and pushed out by that throbbing seed of pure energy after it was sucked out of existence in a shaking, deafeningly silent moment. Lockdown fell a thousand miles down and up, down and up a thousand miles away from his body and the slam of his back was the explosion outside._

_The stars burned. Her star burned even harder—and saved him, by not completing the circuit._

_Spared._

Stunned.

_Funneled by her last reach, the hateful energy screamed up the canon and up his arm and exploded right next to his face in a flare of orange-red agony, ripping a full-body scream out of him._

His arm was across the bridge. The canon was a peeled flower at the tip. The remnants of his arm still clung to it, ripped to glistening smoke-marbled shreds. His bad arm. Lockdown, visual field flickering, looked to his right. A pool of oil shone under his right side, through all the smoke. An ugly, wire-clotted hole lay where his arm used to be. It dripped.

It didn't matter how long he had been out. He didn't know what was outside—he didn't know that the far-away black Decepticons were frozen, drifting through space with wounded Sparks that would take many cold megacycles to flicker back to life. Because he didn't know, he acted befitting the danger he had been in. Somehow, he got to his knees. Somehow, processor looping maddeningly in a binary, electricity-seared panic, memory core still flushed with dead white and _fear_, Lockdown crawled to the control panel—what was left of it, gaping and smoke-stained like that silicon shell at its center, empty—and forcibly rebooted and hotwired what was left of the gigantic femme, numb digits gouging at her still-trembling corpse without care.

She only lasted four creaking leagues before crashing. It was enough. As they spiraled down to the nearest planet's brown-black surface, Lockdown lost the last of his tattered, hunted consciousness and sagged against the ruptured Spark chamber—core empty of any feeling or hope, save for a complete acceptance of the blackness he had killed so many to escape.

The Decepticon fell.


	28. End and Beginning

A/N: Woo, how uplifting, amirite? Okay, sorry for this… two-in-one, wrapping-up-loose-ends chapter. We'll get to the next arc in due time, and there's loads of fluff before that, and I PROMISE it's worth it.

Also, a note just to clear up any possessiveness issues. LD and Torque have kind of a… friends with benefits thing going on. They were _never_ (oh my god, _ever_) lovers in the classic sense, but I do believe she taught him all he knows (as miniscule as that sad little figure is XD) about liking things/people. Without her, he'd be totally hopeless. With her, he's just depressingly hopeless! One girl can only do so much, ne?

Also-also, MERRY CHRISTMAS! Two chapters in spirit of the season! Mwah!

* * *

End and Beginning

* * *

597 stellar cycles later, Lockdown was ripped out of the dark by a well-placed strike of lightning.

The planet he had crashed on (still barren, after so many centuries) was patchy with dense, savage electrical storms that roamed the plain geography like sizzling beasts, prowling the sulfur-thick winds among shadows and hot flashes. Many times, many solar-cycles, the blue-white streaks knived down within meters of the ship and the stasis-locked mech inside, but never close enough. Nearly six centuries later, a single bolt slammed into the fallen femme's hull, creating a black scar, and the resultant energy roared through every atom of her tender Cybertronian alloys and anything resting within her.

It was excruciatingly bright: Lockdown's neural sensors onlined just in time to be scalded by the hateful influx of craggy ozone-scented power. The pulse acted as a jumpstart that corkscrewed into his beaten center, whitening and tightening. His Spark throbbed so violently he curled around it even as his flexors rippled violently in the energy's stranglehold, holding in the suffocating, bursting sensation with an empty static hiss. His wild, primitive confusion doubled when his vocals booted up, immediately broadcasting a garbled cry of agony—birthing another sudden sensory overload to flinch away from in his all-encompassing dark.

Finally, when the lightening had faded into the rough clicking of his pistons and his Spark was reduced to a faint simmer, Lockdown realized. Realized. It didn't matter what about, because the beaten act fleshed him out at the corners and gave him a center: then he realized, with that simple twitch of his cool, flexible coding, that he was online. Blue light dribbled down his insides. His body felt brittle and distant, still flaking and trembling from the electricity that had ridden it so mercilessly. Processor blank, he attempted to sit up. Pain—_more_ pain—stabbed into his side, wrenching a croak out of his damaged vocals. He looked down blurrily.

First, he saw the gash down his side. Then, his dim optics found the hole where his arm was supposed to be. He stared at it for a solid cycle, unable to dredge up anything but shock-dulled confusion. His maintenance systems had managed to sloppily knit the open wound over with thick wires to prevent exostructure breach and further fluid leakage. It looked like a bulging yarn ball, smeared with oily, dark fluids. That was going to be a glitch to untangle when he got medical attention.

Medic.

He managed to stand up, leaning so heavily on a nearby chair that he left a dent. He looked around, optics losing cherished resolution klik by klik as the compromised state of his current energon stores (thin, reluctant to glow) made itself known in a nauseated internal groan. Grey light filtered in the shattered vista, lying like wet powder on three crash-mangled bodies and the dark long-dried fluids under them. Grey optics. Slack flaking faces. He stood inside a creaking corpse, skeletons twisted at all sides.

Slowly, very slowly, Lockdown shook his head. Then, consciousness returning file by file, he numbly pressed one servo over the long-sealed wound and stumbled out of the ship.

* * *

Tipper hated runners.

He knew the look of them, the klik they shuffled in with a clogged fuel line or a bum piston. Shifty, much like himself. His was a smooth kind of shifty, however, his actions amounting to something like a constant undulation—not at all like their jerky, nervous fits that screamed that they _didn't have the credit_. He knew, even if they didn't sprint out to avoid paying, they would gyp him in some way. Why did he treat them? Simple. He needed good word-of-mouth, he was bored, and he always had faith in 'bot-kind (which was never rewarded no matter how hard he faked it, so it was more like a wild gamble and he was somewhat fond of gambling when bored, so it worked).

Tipper hadn't had a true runner in a while, so he was slow on his pedes when the hulky green artillery 'bot hurtled for the door the moment the medibot finished tightening up his cooling fans; equally so, he didn't note the inanity in shouting for someone to stop the afthole when he knew his 'waiting room' (a modified hangar, barely lit—he hadn't had a proper facility in a while, since he opened his doors to both factions) was either empty or piled with non-operational sacks of bolts. Infuriated, Tipper howled that someone stop him, damnit, grab him—then screeched to a halt once he caught sight of the tall, black near-silhouette of a mech half-hunched in the middle of his waiting room, swaying harder than sugarcane. The escapee bowled toward him, meaning in his blind panic to push the other out of the way and flee into the dark, but the new mech managed to twist and punch the scoundrel in the abdominal section alongside a strike to his head, sending him clanging to the floor with a stunned full-system moan.

Tipper (gone hastily silent and focused on making himself as small as possible) waited and carefully laced his over-long digits together as the—Decepticon, now he could see—slowly leaned over, dug his thick green servo into his patient and held him out by the base of his neck. Towards Tipper. Offering him. Tipper stared at the strange sight for a good cycle, absorbing the lumbering, vicious-looking mech _with one arm_ who seemed to have trouble focusing his gelatinous red optics on him.

"Need a check-up, doc-bot," he grunted, vocals destroyed enough to make the severely-small medibot jump.

"From the looks of it, you need a frame-transplant and a full-system overhaul," Tipper answered blandly. The mech shook his head, every movement hazy and borderline. It was fine that Tipper had stared for so long, apparently—this mangled mech seemed to have no concept of the passage of time. Tipper knew the dreamy, disjointed rhythm of bots whose chronometers were defunct. This one looked like he'd been through a junkyard: his chronometer might be the most intact thing he could claim. The mech waggled his knocked-out captive like one would parade a trinket.

"You need this 'bot?

Tipper watched him with an odd mix of trepidation and admiration, grass-green optics lingering on the stump of an arm.

"Yes," he said slowly, simply wondering where the strange mech was going to take it.

"He's my payment." The injured mech flung him _one-servoed_ in front of the medibot, resulting in a splitting clang and a scramble from Tipper as the limp Autobot slid too close. Then he proceeded to trudge past the much smaller mech and straight into his office, calling back, "Take him, and gimme an EM pulse so strong I can't feel my own core."

Using another mech for payment? Tipper liked this 'bot. Unprincipled.

Grinning more out of nerves than satisfaction, Tipper labored to drag the unconscious check-dodging scum into an unused closet and locked the door before wiping his servos (venting gratuitously, he was no laborer) and returning to his new patient. Watching the Decepticon struggle up onto the medical berth with heavy, set-jaw movements, Tipper remembered his request or _order_ and fetched the EMP generator.

"Is… the pain that intense?" He asked, once the huge, lanky mech was settled. The activity had broken some kind of sealant in his wound, and Tipper winced as filthy oil seeped out and spattered onto his cluttered but clean floor. The mech didn't seem to feel any of it, simply shaking his head again.

"I miss oblivion," he said thickly. His optics flickered once before he shut down, sprawled on Tipper's table, and that was that.

Even with the mech in fathoms-deep stasis, the spell of his threatening presence was not broken. Maybe it had to do with the spikes, or the fact he smelled like lightning—or the way he covered up every inch of the medibot's huge table. Whatever Tipper's plans had been before, he certainly couldn't move the giant machine off of his table until he was online. He had half a processor to search his serial number for any tags or alerts (both Autobots and Decepticons paid well for traitors these days—just because he was open to both sides didn't mean he favored either enough to turn down a lucrative opportunity and medically sedated 'bots were so _pliant_), but the drip-drip of the mech's most severe and messy injury called to him first and foremost. Picking up his tools and setting to work with the pleasant knowledge of the runner locked in the closet, Tipper realized that this could work out for the better.

Technically, he was taking the mech on credit… which implied a debt. Debt meant connection, and (as cerebral and, ahem, underbuilt as he was) he could certainly use a friendship with a mech like this one, whatever his name was. Exiles always could.

If he could vault the chance that his new patient would attempt to offline him in a fit of confusion or rage the moment he rebooted, he felt things would go rather well between them.

* * *

"I can't fix your arm."

Lockdown, as he was introduced, was easy enough to boot up once his emergency stasis inducers were metaphorically hammered down. They'd been active so long they were nearly stuck, overactive and stiff in function—not that the time didn't warrant it, because unless he had completely futzed up the chronometer realignment, the bad 'bot had been in emergency stasis-lock for a little over half a millennium. Tipper tried not to be _too_ curious as to where he'd been and what he'd pissed off beforehand. He was in bad shape in every way, but a heavy cube of much-needed (and strings-free, _certainly_) mid-grade energon slicked up his vocals enough.

Lockdown's beastly face crinkled as he tried to understand what the medibot had just told him.

"What's the problem?" He rasped.

"Mostly, it's just that: your arm. It's not there," Tipper said brightly. "I certainly can't fix what's not there."

Pause.

"And?"

"Well. Um." Most mechs didn't take so cleanly to the idea of not having a part of themselves anymore. His patient was either running very, very slowly, or this was simply the way he _was_. Tipper righted himself and refreshed his vocals, clarifying, "It doesn't have to stay that way. A good servo-full before you have lost limbs before, Lockdown, the market's set right up for amputees—and there's always prosthetics until you can get to a crafter."

"I need an arm," Lockdown said stiffly, angrily. Now that he was aware of it, he didn't seem capable of much more thought than that: his entire foggy consciousness circled around the aching blank spot to his right, spawning a ghastly frown on his already none-too-handsome features.

"Yes," Tipper agreed slowly, once more squinting at the other mech from behind his magnifiers. Waiting. He didn't have too long to stare: something flickered behind his patient's brightening red optics and Lockdown looked up.

"F'I bring you one, you'll hook it up."

"It all depends on compatibility and—I mean, I—yes," he blurted, spooked by Lockdown's violently determined look and his one-servoed grip on the edge of the medical berth. "Y-yes, I guess I can."

While repairs were relatively simple, getting a new body-part fashioned—to fit, to match—was a long, expensive process. It was something Lockdown didn't seem quite suited for, either financially or patience-wise, but it also wasn't the medibot's problem, so when the hulking mech disappeared with nothing but a nod, Tipper didn't give it another thought. A week later, Lockdown walked into his shop with a wiry, red-plated _arm_ clutched in his only fist and set it down on the medibot's table with an air of finality. Wires frayed out where it had been ripped off. Perfect, said Lockdown's blank, unwavering red stare, for fusing with the carefully segmented and capped wires protruding from his own shoulder-slot.

There was nothing else to do; nothing to say or ask. With a stifled gulp, willowy servos shaking, Tipper picked up the heavy, complex, _very Autobot_ arm and so it began, with the hum of a soldering iron. It was the first of many in a rotating menagerie of limbs, outlining in every straying color and differing cut what Lockdown, neither Autobot nor Decepticon, was to be. A scavenger: taking the best, or simply taking what he could take. Never would he walk away empty-servoed, so hungry was he for gain, for domination, for spoils and power. Never.

Tipper couldn't help but shudder when, completely outfitted with his new skinny red limb, Lockdown flexed—and smiled for the first time.

"Now you just… need a ship."

Turning to face his newest acquaintance and saving extortion, Lockdown's optics whirred disconcertedly then he gave Tipper a grin twice as terrible as the one that preceeded it.

"How good are you at patchin' on a big scale, doc-bot?"

* * *

He rebuilt her: spare parts and money. Time. He rebuilt her because he was useless without a means of transportation, unable to pay back his debt to the scrawny medibot even after five months as his bouncer. He had no credit, but knew of a perfectly good carrier shell corroding away on an unknown planet. But he knew, as everyone did, that strange things happened to those whose Sparks had been combusted, not snuffed--so he rebuilt her with the knowledge that if she ever woke up long enough to realize who he was, she would murder him.

Memory-core wipes were cheap when the back-alley hackers didn't have to worry about off-lining anyone in the process. It was simple, fast. He took the needed measures and the ship—his ship--was finally quieted, hopefully for an eternity. He watched as the spooked mechanics rebuilt the control panel, walling off her shattered chamber from the white air of the pathetic, storm-scattered planet and smoothing a violated, memory-darkened body into a right flying machine, and told himself the one thing that would drive his entire function.

No reverence, no pretense. Nothing goes to waste.

* * *

-.-.-.-

* * *

Three solar-cycles later, they dropped her off. Lockdown did not wave, but Torque made up for it by waving on and on and on until Prowl gave a little raise of his servo. Satisfied as much with Lockdown's impatient sneer as Prowl's calm smile, she disappeared into the towering grey mechanic's shop and the two partners had each other to themselves once more.

Five days with the huntress had been both a challenge and a pleasure. Prowl, for all his enjoyment, was glad to see her go: their ship was small enough in the first place and Lockdown had been growing a little cagey with her around, being coy and knowledgeable as she so loved to be. Besides, the bounty hunter hated change with a passion and earmarks of irreversible changes were beginning to pop up between him and his old friend—just with the simple and cataclysmic addition of a _partner_.

One particular solar-cycle, he dared to indulge in a game of grab-aft with the huntress. Figuring she knew the score now, he figured she wouldn't object to a bit of thrill-centered physical appreciation if just for old time's sake--but when his mammoth servo closed over her glossy aft as she was leaning over the control panels, she whirled and popped him one across the knuckles. She hiked her leg up on his chair-arm (which truly didn't help his lust but made a spectacularly intimidating clang) and told him in no uncertain terms that Primus almighty, if he had managed to avoid screwing 'this' up yet, she certainly wasn't going to let him do it now, and he'd better keep his servos off of her if he knew what was good for him because Prowl was in the next room _meditating_ like a blameless little seraph--and so on and so forth. Any sort of physicality, apparently, was out of the question now that Prowl was around and that was a realization that would dampen his mood for weeks. For the eternally-hungry bounty hunter, any decrease in 'available aft' was one to lament, long and hard and in detail.

Then there were the questions. Beforehand, there weren't any questions between them due to their long history and respectful disinterest in personal matters, but Lockdown had been unfortunate enough to undergo a 'life change' while she was away and was now at her inquisitive mercy. She, of course, wanted to know things. Daily things, little things, and quirks beyond that. Dirty secrets. He told her, for instance, how Prowl (the cold-oiled little slagger) used construction pressure-points against him when it came down to servos and blows between them. The fact that Torque tilted her head, made an noncommittal comment then walked off looking immensely satisfied pissed him off more than he could vocalize in that moment. Whose side was she on, and who gave her permission to have alliances in the first place?

Back on the ship, Lockdown was at work warming up Moot's sleepy engines and logging in their next coordinates. He risked a glace at Prowl, who was standing by the vista and studying the grey-colored civilization grinding away beneath them. Lockdown refreshed his vocals.

He was never one for follow-ups, but Torque was something different. With her hindrance (or horrible help), Prowl now had a different perspective on him that the bounty hunter had to make sure wouldn't dick with the equilibrium they'd worked in for stellar-cycles. The reason he hated this friend-meet-friend flavor of change so dearly was that it caused 'bots to change their interpretation of him and to _assume_ and _connote_ and blow little gestures out of proportion and make like he was a _nice mech_ with _feelings_ or something idiotic like that.

Now, while he wouldn't have said anything previously, after introducing a mech-turned-femme that he actually allowed to boss him around slightly and jerk out reactions (not to mention annoy the Pit out of him by hinting at pink-tinted dimensions that simply didn't exist between him and the kid), Lockdown felt, quite correctly, that he had a lot of face to save.

"…Y'like her?"

"Very much," Prowl said after a moment, smiling. He turned toward his partner, visor angled in good humor. "And you? You are fond of her?"

"Not for lack'a resistance," he grunted unhappily, fiddling away with all of his dials. "Gal wouldn't give up. Had to beat her off with a crow bar."

"I'm sure," Prowl answered faintly.

"She idn't usually this annoying," the bounty hunter growled after another warm, easy moment, glaring at the screen. "Just got her wiring in a knot for some reason. Femme thing, came with the conversion."

Lockdown glanced down, then over at the ninjabot, feeling the unhappy heralding of that twitchy, pressurized _reinterpret-assume-connote_ discomfort fill him again as Prowl regarded him with a slow surprise too coy—too convoluted--to be normal.

"Are you… defending her?" He asked curiously, unbearably interested. Lockdown glared at him, shaking for a bare klik before venting a massive, scalding gust of air.

"Primus damn if—the _both_ of you, damnit," he snarled to himself as he gouged and wrenched at whatever needed gouging and wrenching, cursing the fact that he continually picked 'bots who just _thought too damn much_ and miserable for not being at a stage of lift-off that would provide for a speedy, stompy exit. Prowl's smug look burned into his back, only increasing the roar of his internal furnace. Once he got Moot off the ground, the bounty hunter made a terribly delayed stompy exit that only made the situation worse, because he swore he heard Prowl chuckle as he raged into his quarters, very, _very_ upset at having been overanalyzed, or analyzed at all.

Unfortunately, it didn't stop there. Lockdown couldn't help but be suspicious when Prowl called the ancient femme up the next week. He felt strangely duped when he heard her vocals from his shop and came out, all stark surprise, to find Prowl propped attentively in his navigator's chair, just… chatting away. _Chatting_. At first, he was certain they were planning something (but didn't interrogate Prowl about it for risk of seeming intimidated, because there was no goddamn way the two of them were going to get to him. Y'know. Damnit). Then as the weeks and months stretched on and commcalls came every so often, both instigated and received, and no bomb dropped on the poor hunter's head, Lockdown calmed down enough to notice a definite change in his partner.

Prowl was glowing, in a way. He was changing and relaxing, because after so many stellar-cycles of implicit, grossly blunt communication (all goal-oriented, brittle and one-dimensional), he had found someone he could actually _talk_ with. Go to for council, learning, open succor.

It was a blessing, to finally vent his social side with a truly soulful creature—especially one who already smiled at him like she adored him more than all the stars in the galaxy and would take any question with a bark of a blameless laugh. Lockdown had never quite felt guilty for being incompatible with Prowl's introspective intellectual side--and Prowl never resented him for it once he came to terms with their dynamic--but when the gaping non-expectation was lifted, it was actually a relief. Prowl was truly and completely satisfied with his life now, and that meant more to Lockdown than the hunter cared to think (or be overanalyzed) about. The kid was… happy. Not just content, but happy.

The last puzzle piece was in place. The little 'bot had found his niche, snug between the two eccentric hunters: one servo on Lockdown's Sparkchamber, the other on Torque's shoulder. He belonged, in all his parts and pieces.

Torque would stick around, Lockdown was certain, glutton as she was for intrigue. Looked like he'd be seeing more of the old gal in the next few stellar-cycles than he had in the last two millennia and he was fine with that--provided she tone it down. Quit cooing and squirming and _gossiping_ and all that, and not tell Prowl any more than the kid needed to know about him. In the meantime, he now had his servos on a glowing, utterly happy ninjabot, which was always a good thing to have… pliant and agreeable as they are.

Lockdown was very much looking forward to having an empty ship for the first time in solar-cycles. It was… promising.

(Not more than three solar-cycles later, Prowl pinched his tail-fins in a very specific, very titillating way that thoroughly replenished a little of his waning old-friend-new-partner fear. Those two weren't all zen and intellectual succor, that was for certain, even though the usually uptight ninjabot's sly, accomplished smile was something to enjoy. Lockdown's definition of 'promising' changed a bit that solar-cycle, and for once he was glad for a healthy reinterpretation—especially if it involved Prowl and a good deal of well-instructed biting.)


	29. Anniversary

A/N: Lockdown, you're so emotionally retarded. I adore you!

**Also. I've attempted both coyness and niceties regarding reviews**, but if interest is as staggeringly low as you've shown it to be, I see no reason to make this piece a priority or continue with my weekly updates. To everyone who has taken the time (including the last 24-hour rush, yikes-woah), thank you graciously and with many kisses: you have yourself to thank for 29 chapters, because your words and ideas are my lifeblood. Otherwise? I'm pretty sure I'd be just as happy bouncing these stories back and forth between Eno and myself and just leaving it at that.

That's all!

* * *

Anniversary

* * *

Once every blue moon, Prowl stumbled upon a clutch of happy coincidences.

First, he and Lockdown had been together for one-hundred and fifty stellar-cycles. Though sentimentalism was more tender handicap than anything in his line of business, the fact that he had spent so much of his function (over a third, now) with the bounty hunter was a startling thing to think about. Surely Cybertronian standards of time, considering their echoing lifespan, condensed stellar-cycles into smaller star-studded, swallowable things, but a century and a half was still a century and a half. And Prowl was… happy, to boot.

Second, taking his rare string of emotive malfunctions a step further, he accepted the chance to make it memorable. The ninjabot wasn't precisely looking for something to give to his very selective partner (that would have been too internally forward), but when Lockdown spent a near week silently mourning a certain flashy but gorgeously deadly gun he couldn't afford at the moment, Prowl was roused. Coincidence conspired with opportunity, both rubbing their metaphorical hands greedily: thus prompted, Prowl turned a faintly surprised optic to his burgeoning account for the first time in eons.

Hazarding a guess so foggy and nonchalant it would have made an accountant wretch, he dubbed the six-figure sum sufficient for his purposes and proceeded to ninja-tiptoe around until he was certain he had obtained all the information and proof necessary to warrant such a purchase. This involved a good bit of snooping on Moot's search log after his partner went into recharge. Luckily, it was utterly clogged with related accessories, installation procedures--not to mention the gigantic mech kept calling up a visual of it, watching it covetously just so he could be infuriated when it was purchased by someone else. The links were easy to trace, the sellers pliant as plasma. Just like always, Prowl moved silently, quickly, and operated only in the dark of night, enjoying this new domestic breed of stealth moreso than he had expected.

Lockdown, though he couldn't afford it in the first place, spent the whole solar-cycle in an outrageously foul mood when he checked the salesfeed again and found that it had been stolen from him during the short break in his vigil. The bounty hunter didn't think to check Prowl's account. He didn't see the three-thousand credit drop it had taken, nor did he assume Prowl's sudden and aggravating good mood to have any concrete roots. When his quiet little partner waltzed into the bridge with a thick grey carrying case a few solar-cycles later and placed it at the foot of his chair with nothing but a smile, however, he was beyond perturbed. He was… suspicious. When he opened it, he was downright aghast.

It was the gun. _That_ gun: _his_ gun. His Primus-slagging-mother-fragging-sweet-aft gun.

Any crazed elation at having the glossy beauty a scant three spans from him, smelling like green-hued destruction and sweet promised sizzles, was battered to death by the sight of Prowl's retreating shadow. After the initial node-numbing shock wore off, it also confused and displeased the sealant right off of his wiring, because Lockdown was reminded again _how much money_ the brat had because he just didn't care about it. _And_ the glitched little downgrade bought him something scandalously expensive, and there was something crazy and infuriating about the fact he was willing to throw all that cash away just to get his partner something in such a nonchalant, covert manner—or perhaps not just.

There might have been… another cause. No. Of _course_ there was. Mere cycles after receiving the gun, Lockdown gave a scowl so poisonous it could have melted the hair off of a bladderbear—because that was it.

Prowl was trying to manipulate him. The bounty hunter knew it would come to this one solar-cycle, and even as he snagged the gun and lugged it to his shop (and the complex weight of it was _delicious_), Lockdown bucked up, preparing to show the little punk in every day and way that he _couldn't be bought, _damnit. Well, in… this way. Being a master businessman, he wasn't buying into any deal where the terms weren't directly stated—and there was no way in the Well the kid was going to blackmail him with a pretty present. Nudge him over, sugar his solenoids. No way in the Well. He was too damn good for that.

Lockdown's defenses were on high alert for the next week and, to make things worse, Prowl couldn't shake his serene, altruistic mood nor his smooth smiles. Everything only deteriorated from there with a streak of affection and luck. Opportunities to please Lockdown in small (insidious!) ways kept popping up and Prowl, feeling affectionate, took them like shiny fruit globes from a tree—a twist of the wrist was all that was required. He brought the bounty hunter a cube of high-grade one solar-cycle and adjusted his techno-chi the next. Then, after a casual bit of fun, he stayed curled against Lockdown for at least half a megacycle, dozing through the half-flirty purr of his motor.

Of course, his own smiles and strange contentment didn't blind him to the… effect he was causing. Somehow, someway (though he could guess why—it had, after all, been 150 stellar-cycles) he was tying his partner into knots. Worse than that, Prowl was actually beginning to be amused by the suspicious crunch of Lockdown's face when he followed the ninjabot (sauntering _so_ casually) out the door with his calculating red optics… then took a quick sip of the energon as if to test it. For poison. Drugs. _More_ energon, a different _grade_ of energon: anything out of the ordinary, anything to warrant a confrontation.

No, Prowl's usually unflappable partner was stumped. He writhed and huffed and paced underneath an imaginary, gargantuan anvil, swinging above his head and weighing his limbs and rationale in its evil shadow…and over the next week, Prowl teased on and on and on. Finally, when the ninjabot brought him a jug of coolant in his shop—_his_ coolant, not the brat's—Lockdown utterly couldn't take it anymore.

"Alright, what do you want?"

Prowl turned halfway to the door, an infuriatingly airy smile on his long face. Lockdown straightened with barely-contained animosity (already on the grudging offensive, a disposition made clear by a defiant flinging-down of his blowtorch) and glared at him.

"I'm not sayin' you'll get it, but spit it out," he snarled. "What do you _want_?"

"What do you mean?" Prowl asked evenly—innocently, even, with his lilting, ever-measured vocals. If Lockdown could have seen himself, properly distanced from the maddening, cloying charade Prowl had driven him over the edge with, he may have been a tad embarrassed at the fiery, twitchy accusation in his face, or the way he jabbed a digit at his partner and hissed out:

"You want somethin' from me. That gun got you credit, kid, but I won't go along with anything ridiculous. I'll go up to the price you paid, but not beyond."

"It's called a _gift_, Lockdown," Prowl said mildly, smiling all the wider. "And if it is a form of extortion, it's a highly inefficient one. I don't expect anything in return."

If it there was one thing Lockdown knew for certain—his religion, as it were—it was that every action required an equal an opposite reaction. Tit for tat. But now Prowl was insisting his action was a free-swinging kindness. No payment required. Given for the sake of giving.

Yeah, free-swinging: like the slaggin' anvil. If Swindle were here, the arms-dealer would tell him to turn tail and run as fast as possible. The kid made no sense. Gruffly, Lockdown tried again.

"Why'd you get it?"

Prowl straightened, looking at him with a touch of surprise.

"Do you know what stellar-cycle it is?"

"You think I keep track?"

Prompted by the ninjabot's expectant look (the little thing was still unruffled, visor wide and blameless blue), Lockdown wirelessly called up the ship's stats and the date, crunching the foreign-looking numbers with a disturbed squint. He looked back at Prowl wordlessly. Prowl smiled.

"I may be off by a stellar-cycle or two, but we have been in business for a century and a half."

Lockdown stared at the wall for a moment, trying to comprehend it. He scratched his neck.

"Yeah. That's… a while."

"Congratulations," Prowl said softly.

"Congrats to yourself," he grunted, optics locked on whatever was in his servos—he didn't have to know the name of it to use it as a way to avoid Prowl's stare.

Prowl smiled at him again and turned to leave, compact black form trailing an airy, content mystique. It was the final crack in a chain of busted links. Lockdown bolted out of his chair, driven to an absolute frenzy by the coy, conniving creature that had replaced his partner in the night.

"What do you _want_, damnit?!" He demanded, gesticulating madly. "I'm not gonna believe you're actin' so fraggin' bizarre for nothin'!"

So--it was true. Lockdown simply didn't understand. Prowl turned back again, venting a small bit of air.

"Fine." The ninjabot gave a small, curt smile and addressed him clearly: "If you insist upon the fact that I extort something from you…"

_Here it comes_. All those indirect, insidious little manipulations coming to a head.

"A smile."

It was possibly the worst thing to ask for. Ever.

Lockdown refreshed his optics twice, felt something crack behind them, then spent the next two airless cycles containing a wide variety of snarls and spits as Prowl looked on. His expectations for the kid's final punch—privileges, more organic slag, possibly a exotic sexual favor or three—disintegrated, then coagulated into one very, very uncomfortable, clammy lump right underneath his Spark. Finally, devoured by nauseating awkwardness (and doubly-more nauseating fact that he just didn't know what to _do_ when confronted with such a murderously simple and impossible request), he muttered:

"Those don't come free."

"To the tune of three-thousand. I've noticed," Prowl observed archly, leaning back against a tool table and crossing his arms. Lockdown's mouth opened, then shut. Stranded without options, Prowl's visor seeming to drill a hole into his Spark, gun gleaming on the shelf, Lockdown finally snarled and bared his dentals in a horrible caricature of a smile. The sight was so _wrong_--somewhere, a Sparkling probably rebooted screaming--that Prowl couldn't help but chuckle.

"Thank you," he said with a shake of his head, and left.

Just… left.

The brat bought him a three-thousand-credit gun with no word of warning, proceeded to torture him with kindness for the next week, and all he said was 'thanks'. Primus. There was something seriously wrong with that 'bot. If he didn't have a handful of wires switched end-to-end somewhere, Lockdown was in need of a defragging.

Still, hard as he tried to shake the entire inexplicable upheaval off and get back to his work, Lockdown couldn't help staring after his partner—then looking long and hard at the gun. Then he took a swig of coolant, then half-winced and looked at the gun again.

Needless to say, he didn't like where his thoughts were going.

* * *

A few weeks later, Prowl found something outside his door. Several somethings, in fact.

He nearly stepped on the compact disks, foggy as he was from a good, much-needed recharge: the two had completed another grab-and-bag job the solar-cycle before which involved far, far too much driving and sprinting. They were lucky to have made it to their berths without shutting down. Huffing, Prowl nearly lost his balance, squirming at the last klik to avoid crunching the little trinkets. Next, he went down to his knees and gathered them into his servos, carding through them with a wide-optic'ed bemusement. At first, the titles and compatibility warnings, much less the fact that he'd found them scattered in front of his door like lazy confetti, refused to make sense.

Then, slowly but surely, he smiled.

They were files for his datapad. It was an eclectic little collection, either composed from too much thought or too little thought. There were classics, exotic documentaries, things much like he enjoyed. Then Prowl found what he could only assume was pornography involving tentacle creatures and he had to laugh aloud: the collection only worsened from there, spiraling downwards into the depths of 'Accounting for Ironagabic Imbeciles' and 'My Life as a Vokian Pleasure Slave'. Lockdown had obviously located a bargain bin and simply _grabbed_. The visual made Prowl chuckle again; he could simply imagine the weird and uncomfortable mental-emotional acrobatics Lockdown had gone through to consider getting them at all, and that only made his cozy Spark expand even more.

He looked at the collection with a fond optic, carding through them again. Lockdown had gotten him something. Perhaps it was in hounded response to Prowl's own gifting, (a desperate thrashing to conquer or defeat an unknown language of voluntary emotional transactions from a 'bot who hated to be trumped) but it was still a token, considerate…in general…of his intellectual leanings. A _gift_. A personal gift.

Primus, how far they had come.

Yes, it was already a strange and pleasing development, but the ninjabot knew he had to push it: make it settle in as an actual approved act, not a half-remembered last resort. Prowl gathered them into his fist and strode to the bridge.

Lockdown was hunched at the controls: new stats shone on the screen, in dull grays and greens and bright blues. A new job, judging from the rapid tick-taks of his typing and the 3D render spinning in the middle. Prowl leaned against the wall, just out of sight. He refreshed his vocals.

"I found something outside my door," Prowl said with a carefully-engineered curiosity. He paused. "Are these for me?"

Lockdown grunted. Prowl took that to be a yes.

"What do I owe you for them?" He asked casually, turning them over in his servos. Lockdown's engine hitched. He shifted uncomfortably at the control station, not looking at his partner.

"S'a gift. Means I'm not s'posed to expect anything in return."

"Supposed to?" Prowl repeated puckishly, and that was the end of it.

The hurdle had been vaulted. He had gotten Lockdown to say the word, and that was truly all he wanted; besides, he had been more than cruel to the other mech but weeks before, so he supposed a little _understandable_ kindness was in order. Lockdown seemed to sense the pleased, coy shift in his partner and looked over his spiked shoulder, a grin spreading over his devious white face. Prowl, for zany reasons unknown, loved the emotionally-handicapped bounty hunter strangely and intensely in that bantering, _them_ moment.

"'Bot can't help but hope for a thank you," the huge mech said slyly, turning at his station, wheel-studded hip cocked. Prowl responded in kind, placing the discs down in his partner's navigator chair and sauntering up to his side, placing one warm servo against Lockdown's hip on the control panel. He leaned close.

"Of what fashion and caliber?" He asked professionally, mouth still twitching; still dying to smile and _reward_ Lockdown for such good behavior.

"Horizontal and damn good."

Prowl laughed—actually laughed, not a curtailed chuckle or a close-mouthed snicker—as Lockdown swept him off his pedes and sat him on the control panel, already deep in the act of seducing him. They were ridiculous, the both of them.

"Lockdown."

His partner made a perfunctory inquiry noise past his mouthful of Prowl's neck, both servos cupped around his aft, driving his delicate knees apart to accommodate the bounty hunter's spiked, ever-randy girth. Prowl, feeling giddy for possibly the first time in his straight-line life (with 'My Life as a Vokian Pleasure Slave' in plain view on Lockdown's chair), laughed again.

"Absolutely nothing," he sighed in amusement, let his brutal, physical, _learning_ partner take the reins, and thought that anniversaries weren't as terribly overrated as people made them out to be.


	30. Racing Stripes and Honest Opinions

A/N: Oh… oh wow. Just, um… wow?!

Primus, guys, way to make my heart (SPARK) swell! I'm just speechless at the outpouring: thank you so much for taking the time and the love. And because of it--okay, so, I've been writing like mad this week XD See what you guys did to me? Be nice, and I'm awfully quick and eager to reward! You get three chapters!

As for questions and things!

**LastDitch**: Thank you so much, honey! Don't feel pressured, I don't expect or desire cultured novelist statements XD Just reactions! Also, I know it's often limiting not to know what's going on the rest of the world (even with as cloistered as these two are) but now, thanks to your bunny, LD and Prowl WILL have a run-in with the Elite Guard. It'll take a while, but I promise it's out there :3 It'll kinda… explain things a bit, like how and why the Autobots aren't looking for Prowl. Thank you for the help!

**Maraluch**: Torque actually did orgasm upon hearing about it XD BUT THAT'S OFF-SCREEN SHHHH.

**Kaekokat**: Awesome! I'll love to read it when you're done.

**TFAMisteryFan#1:** Um. Bumblebee's dead, love o.o So is Megatron, but that isn't anybody's concern but Sari's. (OOOH NONEXISTENT SPOILER.) PS: Skim-reading is the penultimate evil, the ultimate being infanticide-with-sporks SO DO NOT DO plz.

OKAY /NONSENSE. Heehee.

Uh. As for this? This is just a dearly-beloved snippet. It doesn't deserve any more description than 'Torque being obscenely female' and 'the boys doing some facing-up'. XD This made me smile so much, I could hardly break for dinner in-between!

* * *

Racing Stripes and Honest Opinions

* * *

Prowl was in the middle of something (as he always seemed to be, despite the limited activities of the ship) when the main screen ting-a-linged with a call from Torque. Setting himself down in Lockdown's chair, he glanced briefly at her serial-code-location, just for interest's sake, then accessed the line. The screen lit up.

"Hello there, darling."

"He—"

Mid-word, Prowl stopped. He stared. Then, thinking himself insane, he refreshed his optics and simply stared some more.

It wasn't the light of the planet in the background (though it was an uncommonly bright shade of orange) nor the blood-red flora in the foreground that drew his attention, but Torque. Or rather, the varying stripes of blue and pink and white plowing down her chassis and banding her forearms, all shining garishly in the alien light—and that was all that was in _sight_. Prowl, stunned, rattled his head. Shuttered his optics. Unshuttered them.

It didn't work. The horrible Torque impersonator was still there—and looking at him with a haggard sort of expectation, yellow optics glowing.

"Are those racing stripes?" Prowl finally asked, vocals faint with dread.

"Yes," she said defensively, as though she knew she was in for a battle. "I thought it was time for a change."

Prowl was suddenly very, very glad that Lockdown was otherwise occupied. The ninjabot had no idea what the other mech would say if he saw them: probably make the somehow-obviously-tender situation worse with a crack or three about acting her age or, even more horrible, actually find the awful slutty things attractive… His partner had some dubious tastes in some areas of life. The spikes, Prowl found, often explained it all.

Prowl refreshed his vocals. Their silence had never before been awkward, both being skilled and ardent conversationalists, but after making her sniffy stand (though she sat fairly neutrally with her legs crossed, she might as well have been standing with her arms crossed and angular face turned upwards), Torque obviously expected him to make conversation and wasn't going to budge an inch until he did. He stumbled internally, digging around and trying not to stare overmuch at her… new look.

"Ah. Hmm. What have you been…doing… lately?" He tried, servo out pleadingly. It was pathetic, but it was more than enough for Torque. She scowled, sucking in a fierce draft of air: within cycles, it became obvious that anything he said was little more than a springboard for a full-boiled, freshly-salted rant.

"Oh, besides work? Hopping every bar on this side of the Attrenian divide," the huntress muttered.

"May I ask why?"

"Why do you think?" She demanded snippily, growing moodier with every word. "_Enjoying_ myself. Parading around, flirting, overcharging myself silly in an excruciatingly undignified manner—all so I can refuse punk-aft, horny little Sparklings half your length of function, because I'm too damn good for them and they should know it."

Prowl refreshed his optics, utterly lost and hysterically uncomfortable to boot. The usually self-contained, expert femme was writhing with rage and snarling aggravation of the distinctly female variety, hectic energy nearly draining him of words--which was difficult, as formulating answers to her was already akin to pulling teeth.

"And… are they pursing you adequately?"

"_No_," she snapped. "And they _should be_."

Uh.

"That…sounds…"

Stunned, Prowl carded through words like 'highly diverting', 'exciting' and possibly 'emotionally rewarding'—anything he could say with a straight face and maintain his clinical tone. Within kliks, he gave up.

"That sounds highly uncharacteristic of you, Torque," Prowl said slowly, looking at her as though she might combust on the spot. She didn't disappoint: at those words, the magenta femme let out a groan-howl combination that nearly made his Spark jump, then proceeded to flop herself on the ground and beat at her knees.

"I know! Prowl, I'm in a downright _state_," she whined, rolling around with her head in her servos while making a drawn-out, agonized sound. "I feel old! Old and hideous to boot: I can't get anything under three millennia to even scan me for superficial stats! Please, honey, please _help_. Say something, anything! Tell me something I want to hear."

Prowl gave a somewhat battered chuckle, still just as lost as he was before, but now saddled with a direct order. He didn't have to think long to fulfill it.

"You are… beautiful, Torque."

She ceased rolling and looked at him. After an attentive, face-searching cycle during which he sat still, shining with an honest quirk of his mouth, she finally exhaled and smiled at him like he'd cured something deep and aching. Engine humming softly, she curled up into a comparatively small magenta ball, exposing some more garish pink-blue-white markings on her legs. Prowl snorted.

"I promise you, you are quite beautiful," he repeated. "And those racing stripes? Are obscene."

"I _know_," she sighed tragically, beyond caring that the ninjabot was now smiling at her not a little bit teasingly. She crammed her servos over her mouth and threw her head back, muffling her thick voice. "But they were so criminally expensive, I'll have to wait a decade or three before I'm so sick of them that I can justify scraping them off my aft."

"I'm sorry," he chuckled, then paused, visor quirking. "…They reach all the way to your—"

"_Yes_."

Pricked, she glared at him so fiercely that he put his servos up, feigning an end to his curiosity. Within kliks, however, she deflated again.

"And you needn't be sorry. This is all my doing. I'm just… in a rut. Working off my issues with paintjobs. _Primus_, I'm cheap," she groaned, clutching at her head again and covering her optics. Prowl frowned, confused.

"I thought you said they were—"

"Other kind of cheap, sweetheart," she deadpanned.

"Ah."

Heavy with freshly-confided regret, she rolled over onto her fore, placing her chin onto her crossed forearms.

"You'd best put up a screen blocker in case Lockdown walks in," she said glumly. "I'm not keen on him seeing me like this. Who knows what the beast will say…?"

"You are safe. He is occupied, scouting on the surface," he assured her, then paused. "And you called for…?"

"For a bit of stability," she answered, looking at him blankly—as though the stripes and the resulting emotional crisis had, indeed, said it all. Besides that, it was simply what friends did. "Is that alright?"

"That is fine." Prowl smiled, flattered that she would come to him for such a thing. She smiled back, but it wasn't long in lasting. The sweet quirk faded, and soon her full mouth was low-set and sad, optics hazy. The two sat in silence for a cycle or two, then she sighed again.

"I met someone," she said quietly, looking to the side. "I just wanted to admit that, I suppose. Say it aloud."

Her behavior—erratic, unreasonable and more than a little tacky—made a little more sense.

For anyone else, 'meeting someone' was a happy occurrence. For someone who spent the majority of their time keeping out of sight, minimizing her contact with the outside world… it was a slip-up and a nugget of trouble. A distraction and a tempting tragedy that she would not--could not—allow to go any further than the first flutters of attraction. Prowl's visor bent in concern. He was fully aware of how deeply she became absorbed in people; how irresistible they were to her, while resisting was a battle in and of itself.

"I... I apologize. Are you all right?"

"I'll get better," she promised him softly. Everything, even Spark-sweet at-first-sight infatuation, faded in due time. She sighed and smiled, tapping her screen affectionately. "Thank you, darling. You're much better to talk to than your grumpy old partner—you know that?"

"I could have guessed."

"Still, do tell him."

"What?" Prowl asked, bemused.

"Anything you want him to know," she said, shrugging a bit. "Sometimes we all need to hear it, even if it's obvious—and even if we're emotionally glitched and gagging on our own mechismo. He'll listen. If it's you, he'll pay attention."

He thanked her uncertainly and she nodded, smiling a tad and pointing to the one white stripe defacing the crown of her head.

"Honest opinions really are worth their weight in gold."

* * *

That evening, Moot hovering above the multiple sunsets on their current planet, Prowl got up the courage to say how honestly happy he was.

It was subtle, of course, like he always was. Something explicit never would have settled well with word-phobic Lockdown. The ninjabot had to veil the soft statement and tie it into their recent chain of successes and the numbers in their respective credit accounts, but he knew the other mech caught the message. He _listened_ far too long to miss it. Leaning back over his chair, Lockdown looked at him for a moment, vented a gruff bit of air, then turned back to his main monitor. Unbeknownst to Prowl, his dark old Spark thrummed.

"Got that right, kid," he murmured with a rare quirk of his mouth, and that was that.

The bridge was quiet and happy, both sharing something intimate and reassuring and without a single further word. Each mech resumed their business in their tiny ship with an unseen smile, Lockdown booting up a search program and Prowl trolling the local customs of the planet beneath them. Then—

"Holy—frag, is that Torque?!"

"She called earlier. I was unable resist taking a freezeframe," Prowl admitted with a guilty smile, coming over to lean over his partner's thorny shoulder to gander at the sleazy paint-job (on their so-very dignified friend) one more time. Lockdown guffawed for a good while, nearly pounding the control panel into scrap in his doubled-over, head-in-servos mirth—then, with horrible predictability, stopped and narrowed his optics, then grunted that the stripes actually looked kinda good on her. Provided, of course, they went down to her aft. Did they go down to her aft? If Prowl didn't tell him, he was going to call her up and ask her to turn around and waggle her hopefully striped aft for him. Prowl put his head into his servos, sighing small and short.

Dubious tastes, indeed--with tact in short supply.


	31. On Hold

A/N: I love it when Prowl is pissed at Lockdown XD Like, honestly personally pissed, like we all get at those we love. ('Cos you have to admit, there's an awful lot to get pissed at.)

The other name for this chapter is The Happy Fun Time Grab Bag For All Those Little Sexual Quirks That Don't Really Merit Their Own One-Shots + Nugget Of Stunning Domesticity. Yay! Also, I'd love to thank Enolianslave for this, because she's my bayyy-beee and I love her to death, and she also draws the most outrageously tasty spanking pictures.

FOR FUN THO. NOT 4 SRSLY. … Did that save face, or just make it worse? Hmm.

PS: Y'know that third chapter I promised…? Check AFFnet :D DeeDaday, remember! Heehee! … Sorry about the Torque overload today, it was not intended.

HAW HAW PUN.

* * *

On Hold

* * *

Being a professional business partnership as they were, many facets of Lockdown and Prowl's life centered around the communicator ringing off the hook.

Rather, many moments of their life consisted of professional situations interrupting unprofessional ones. Because of this, an unspoken rating system had developed between the two, consisting of what was and was not acceptable to drop in favor of answering their business line--and the former list was staggering. The latter, however, only really consisted of three things: deactivation, near-deactivation or interfacing. The first had never occurred, the second only twice, so there was truly only thing standing (or lying) in the way of the two hunters and unconditional professionalism… and oh, it stood to rival a siege-machine.

It was amazing how, after all their stellar-cycles together, Prowl was able to keep Lockdown on his berth with a simple noise. It was more than a noise, of course, but it began there—with a husky, sweet-second _exhalation._ It was given warmth and depth and coy salt by the heat under his armor, fleshing it into something short of a moan as their mouths parted, but Prowl (dignified Prowl) never _moaned_—which made the almost-moan all the more appealing. Lockdown would pause, engine instantly idling higher.

Afterwards it was the languid curl of his body, the act of dragging his digits down his partner's side for 'traction' as he twisted up into a rare kiss: quick and efficient, guaranteed to produce instant, judgment-impairing insanity in your nymphomaniac bounty hunter of choice.

Prowl, as he had found out many stellar-cycles earlier in a regrettable and unnecessary situation, was none-too-skilled at seduction. He was awkward on his own and needed the stimulation of another to come to full, rattling-purring power: simply getting lost in his own pleasure and the fight of the moment made him beautiful, but he couldn't exert that sensual aura cold turkey. With Lockdown, however, so long as he kept it simple and implicit rather than explicit, seduction was easy but nonetheless shamefully satisfying. It was especially fun seeing him return the (incredibly irritated) client's call forty cycles later with a suspicious lack of excuses while Prowl made a point to linger in his peripheral visual-field with one leg cocked up on the dash, servo folded absently at the inside of his pale not-quite-cooled thigh.

Lockdown had always been a bit of a slave to his impulses, most especially the sexual ones. Some days, it seemed Prowl drove him crazy. Other days, when Prowl made a smirking hobby of it, it was fact.

On those 'other days', it was rarely the hobby of a bored and impulsive ninjabot. He was a motivation-oriented creature, after all, and intimacy (alongside the agony of deprivation) was as good a weapon as any when Lockdown needed to be paid back for any number of depraved stunts he pulled on his partner. There was, for instance, the stunning moment of indignity where Lockdown had lured him over with a casual motion, then proceeded to fling him across his lap in a vertigo-swollen lurch and bring his servo slamming into his backside for no apparent reason other than the 'satisfying' resounding ring. 'Spanking', Prowl learned, did not please. More than that, Lockdown dearly needed to learn that there were repercussions to such acts outside of being glared at for the following week.

Goal in mind, the ninjabot first set his most infamous and well-used trap a few solar-cycles later. He received a call when his partner was otherwise occupied, then put the new client on hold. Then, practically sashaying into Lockdown's cramped quarters, he roped his unsuspecting partner in with soft movements and aspirations and overt 'please-face-me-silly' full-body twists just as he wirelessly reactivated the client's line and informed him (solicitously, as Lockdown's servo was crammed wantonly between his legs and the other huffed how _he slaggin' drove him crazy, kid_) that his call would go through and one of them would be with him shortly—then switched the call back to the main line again.

Biting off his oh-so-rare vocalizations, Prowl froze as the comm-line rang and rang, then deflated with hesitancy as it kept ringing, leaving (cursing, business-first) Lockdown to sprint out of the room, answer the call, rush his client, make a short-cut, forget to haggle properly for the price, then terminate the call and race back to the room, only to find Prowl—before sprawled across his berth with legs cocked apart so lazily, like a liquid sex-kitten, aft twisted to the side to expose that clean, creamy slope in-between his thighs—absolutely… ruined.

The ninjabot was propped up in a corner with his datapad, body compact and expertly angled. Long face cool and tempered with vague interest, he looked up at Lockdown's utterly crushed expression (the door had closed, his hot romp with an absurdly willing, lusty, open-mouthed Prowl absolutely dashed), cinching all of the other mech's anguish into one unseen spasm with a deadpan "What?".

Oh, it was worth it. He was upset for _megacycles_. Prowl was not shallow, no—but on the rare occasion, when his pride was stung (say, alongside his servo-printed aft), he could be viciously petty. In other situations, Lockdown—the eternal preacher of professional behavior when it suited his purposes—disappointed him severely with his antics, to where he fully deserved the guff he got from his smaller (and more devious) partner. Prowl would consider himself remiss in his duties as a partner if he let such behavior slide—so dig in his heel-struts, he did, all in the hopes of straightening out his mess of a business liability to a mildly acceptable degree.

It was a tough job, but some 'bot had to do it.

* * *

Ringringringringringring.

Ringinginginginginging-_ring_.

Prowl looked up, visor denting in the middle. The main line had been ringing for at least three cycles, and there was nothing but thick, buzzing silence from across the ship. Nothing—or no one--moved to answer it.

Why Prowl didn't move to answer it himself (aside from the fact he was solidly absorbed in his current reading and he didn't usually do so when it was the specific 'returning customer' ring-tone) was another matter entirely, because he knew full-well where and in what state his adorable partner was currently languishing—and was decidedly grateful for the obnoxious sound, if only that it would make the other mech's existence a little more miserable. Lockdown lay in his room like a ramshackle pile of spare parts, conquered after getting outrageously overcharged during the previous on-shore 'leave' night in what had devolved into a bar brawl, which he took eager part in.

After the glass-shattering, howling tussle of imbeciles ended, Prowl had been forced to walk him back to the ship, supporting him the entire way lest he stagger his way into a ditch, but was none-too-gentle when chucking the oversized mech into his dark quarters. As with all excessive overcharges, Lockdown smart systems fought for homeostasis during recharge by forcing the fuel through his body at an accelerated pace, and now, the morning after, his body was sore and buzzing with the grind of his overworked techno-metabolism and the gurgle of his low energon cells. Not only that, he had a Pit of a processor-ache.

Prowl was already fed up with Lockdown—had been fed up with him for the last twenty megacycles, actually, ever since he dashed a chair over a hooligan's head for the sheer screaming love of it—but the ninjabot took a bracing bit of ventilation before comm-calling him, mouth twisted impatiently to the side.

"Lockdown," Prowl murmured once the connection went through. "_Lockdown."_

Far away but right in his audio-unit, Lockdown grunted. Prowl could hear him shifting in a series of sleepy clanks. The sound of his voice, his face was smashed against his cool berth.

"Mng."

"It's for you."

A beat, and Lockdown moaned. Prowl sighed heavily.

"It's. For. You."

"You geddit."

"Lockdown."

"C'mon."

"Please. Indulge me. I'm certain—" Tag check. "—certain 'Mosini the Slime-Curdler' will enjoy your very professional explanation of the fact that you're too undercharged to haggle—"

"_C'mon_."

It was both amusing and aggravating that the old mech's malicious charm and negotiation skills devolved into the groaning repetition of a single word after a 'fun night'. Prowl grit his dentals. Punishment.

"No."

"Slag, yer a cold-oiled little—"

Lockdown mumbled off something very petty and foul and personal, which only made Prowl's iron-clad hackles raise higher.

"I am not your secretary," he half-hissed.

"Wouldn't pay ya if y'were. Can't do it worth scrap."

Prowl had nothing to say to that. Rolling his optics, he shut off the comm and went back to his datapad a little bit stiffly, hoping the constant ringing would drive Lockdown insane. Within a few (maddening) cycles, his comm beeped again in a decidedly contrite way.

"C'mon," Lockdown moaned, stuffy anger giving way to exhaustion and pain. Hearing his tone, Prowl frowned, as though it truly didn't pay to punish his partner for his… bawdy late-night activities. Maybe. "Can't do it. S'bad for business."

Don't start anything you can't finish, he preached—and right now, the bounty hunter _knew_ he would mumble his way into a hole with anything more cunning than a piece of fungus. It might have been flattering for Lockdown to trust him with haggling with a client, but at the moment it seemed a good deal more like laziness and an unwillingness to deal with the consequences of idiotic behavior.

"I trust you to know what is bad for _your_ business," Prowl parried tightly, but not as tightly as before. Hissy fits over and done with, their own cockeyed brand of haggling progressed to the next stage. Even as he knew he could attack Prowl about their _joint effort_, Lockdown heaved a slurred sigh and mumbled his side of the bargain.

"I'll—mrngnm…hzzzn."

It was a proposal, but most of it was lost to the berth. Prowl sighed for the who-knew'th time. Lockdown's offers were ridiculous anyways: especially when in such a fuzzy state, he couldn't possibly consider what his partner honestly wanted and didn't have the mental capacity to think it wasn't more scandalous interfacing acts… Besides, most of the things Prowl wanted (outside of his general fair) were things Lockdown generally didn't, so he ended up having to make his own terms.

"Next organic planet. My choice, twenty-four megacycles."

Lockdown grunted, but not in the positive way. It was forcibly scandalized, capable of holding up to even the most obnoxious commline ring. Prowl frowned again, motor growling.

"Twenty."

Double grunt. Stiff, still unwilling.

"Eighteen."

Lockdown huffed lightly. Deal. It would have been easy to stop there, access the call wirelessly, chase the client off and be done with the infernal ringing and leave Lockdown to lick his wounds… but they had been a long, long time together. So long, in fact, that they could communicate without words and Prowl had long begun to get a little bit curious about forcing Lockdown to expand outside his comfort zone. And, perhaps, make his life a little more miserable along the way.

After all, he could always leave the other mech in the forest if he became obnoxious.

"You will accompany me."

Lockdown snorted, flat and gritty. No deal. But as the phone rang on and on, drilling into his tender audio receptors, and Prowl simply stayed on the line, flat, maddening non-silence stretching on without a single thought of giving in and picking up the call, Lockdown ended up snarling and roaring so hard he rattled his own processor and, in effect, giving in. Victorious, Prowl cut Lockdown off mid-howl and accessed the line with a sly smile and vindicated vocals.

"State your business."

If Lockdown had taught him anything, it was how to negotiate.


	32. Pets

A/N: Yay, more pointless fluff! The 'organic planet' chapter is next, so sit tight. Prowl is picky and takes a long time to choose his planet XD Thanks to this, I now have a hell of a time not comparing Lockdown to the 'get off my lawn' type of rough-neck geezer. Oh. NOEZ.

Also, I started the new semester this week? I think I might die.

* * *

Pets

* * *

Even for one with as much faith in nature's exotic secrets as himself, Prowl had learned long ago that asteroids seldom sported any interesting features. He had also learned they were Lockdown's favorite places to dock for emergency repairs, so he had seen (and been disappointed in) quite a few of them in his time. Now was no different. Something had blown deep inside their aged ship a megacycle earlier and the bounty hunter wasted no time in steering them atop a nearby asteroid, cursing skillfully and loudly as Moot's thrusters petered out into flustered fluffs of light as they touched down.

The ninjabot leaned back on a smooth bit of stone, backfiring fussily when some of the floating space-sediment made it into his intake valve. He didn't care for asteroids, but any chance to get outside the cramped ship was welcome. He vented a bit of non-air. He also didn't care for the relentless suck of space on his inner workings, but that was neither here nor there.

Bored but content, he offlined his optics and mentally drifted like so much aggravating, dreamy space debris in the black liquid of space. When he onlined them again in a spooked blue flash, something was sitting in his lap.

He froze. The creature (or particularly large and quicksilver bit of space-debris, it was hard to tell with the stars so distant and flickering) tilted and wiggled, then vibrated in a way that could only be described as _friendly_. Prowl narrowed his optics, trying to pick out its defining features or any possible gigantic teeth/claws/probisci in the haunting half-light; he smiled uncertainly when it appeared to accommodate his curiosity by twisting and turning, causing oil-spill ripples to glint along its black length.

"Hello," he non-murmured, reaching out a digit. The thing leaned forward, inspected the cream length in turn and appeared to arrive at a very agreeable decision, then eagerly pressed itself into the ninjabot's palm. Otherwise, it made no move to communicate with him and Prowl had been around the galactic block enough times to know to never attempt to pet anything before giving it a chance to extend its race's salutations as a foreign dignitary, or something similar. This little critter just seemed to want company, and Prowl was hardly one to deny it such.

Wondering how such a small thing could survive on a featureless, dead grey rock, bereft of organic life or atmosphere, Prowl played with the creature while Lockdown went about fixing the ship. The busy mech walked back and forth in front of the two of them, propping panels of his steaming carrier on nearby rocks to clear the way for the repair--and even if Prowl would only get in the way if he attempted help, Lockdown made sure to send his partner grumpy glances every third run. Meanwhile and much closer, the alien cavorted around Prowl, who was torn between indulging without a care and trying to discern where the equivalent of its optical sensors were. He attempted to steal touches of its sinewy black skin, only to have it dart away into the rock-solid shadows, then slither against his lower back. Fascinating, surely.

As if to spite his newfound amusement, the repairs took record time to complete. Within the next forty cycles, Lockdown commed him up and told him to get back into the ship—they would need to stop by the nearest C-level planet for the finishing touches on Moot's dented whatever-it-was. Making an affirmative sound, Prowl stood up and sent the curious little thing on its way with a bit more sighing than he should have. After an endearingly long pause, it scampered (or slid) off into the barren landscape.

The ninjabot trudged back to the ramp of the ship, but right as he reached the top of it, Lockdown's huge body moved in front of him like a siege wall.

"_No_."

"_Pardon_?" he texted, then looked up, half-twitching in delayed surprise at having that scratched-up chassis a mere inch from his face.

"Don't play that game with me, kid," Lockdown radioed him flatly, flicking his digits. "Call it off."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Prowl responded, more testily than he should have. Engine grumbling, Lockdown pointed and Prowl turned in time to see a glossy black shape dart behind his other pede. He turned again, bemused, then—as if knowing the jig was up—his friend from earlier was seated right in front of him, tail waving languidly. It made a chirruping noise, ignoring Lockdown towering behind it, starry slits (optics, he'd found them) turned up at him alongside a nonverbal wave of hope.

Prowl couldn't help but smile, but immediately battered it down into a frown when he looked up to find Lockdown's all-too-unhappy glower. His partner's look said what they had never even had to discuss: _I don't do pets_.

Prowl sighed knowingly—Lockdown nodded, but still didn't relax—and led the little creature away and tried to order it to stay. It jumped around his pedes happily for a good while, then seemed to get the message with a bit of careful, listening stillness and a barely restrained full-body droop. Next, it slunk off. As dark as it was, it blended in with all of the crags and craters on the asteroid, but eventually Prowl was on the ramp and there came no stealthy swish-flicker behind his pedes. He looked back for a moment then boarded the ship. Lockdown closed the doors and the security systems engaged with a high-pitched tone. Prowl went to his room and didn't think a thing more of it—knowing, as he learned, to take and release without regret or rancor the small moments of pleasure he received from the outside world.

Lockdown's apoplectic roar when he found the thing 'recharging on his motherfragging head' megacycles later, however, recaptured the ninjabot's interest and hope faster than he deemed healthy.

* * *

"No pets. No pe—damn it, if I can't skin it, eat it or shoot it, it doesn't belong on this fraggin' ship!"

Prowl shrugged, contentedly ignoring his partner (and the possible terms _he_ would be classified under in such a gross over-simplification). Lockdown had been slamming this and that around for a good twenty cycles, sending hair-raising glares at the impossible, impetuous little thing who had been smart enough to take refuge in Prowl's lap. The bounty hunter snorted, then flung a gun to the floor for extra petulance-flavored measure.

"This tin can is small enough as it is! Besides, if we're lookin' for somethin' that barges in and takes what it wants and stays as long as it wants? That position's already filled 'n I don't want another one."

"Are you comparing Torque to a pet?" Prowl asked incredulously after a moment, frowning at the blank 'call in process' screen.

"Try to deny it."

Prowl was saved answering him (it did seem to fit a little too well, even if their resident 'pet' had a little more power over Lockdown than an ittybitty deep space critter ever would) by the creature straining up into his servo again. He had ceased petting it for a moment, and it noticed. The initial reluctance he felt for touching it in such a possibly-derogatory manner was quickly dissolved at the critter's squirming enthusiasm for touch. Before he could become too fascinated with the slithery outer workings of the alien under his sensitive cream-colored dermaplating, the commscreen flickered on.

Lockdown stormed back to his shop as the aforementioned (or afore-slandered) magenta… race-striped…'bot came into focus on-screen, adjusting something on her datapad feed with a slight frown. He didn't want to hear this and he needed to slam more things around to vent his rage—that, and possibly he felt a little guilt at debasing his oldest friend to the level of a moochy pet.

Prowl waited for the slam of the shop door. There.

"Are you occupied?"

"Not for you, darling," Torque assured him, sitting back among her forested organic setting. First half-tempted to ask her where she was, Prowl was saved the trouble of introductions by the appraising narrowing-refocusing whirr of the femme's yellow optics as she picked through the ship's meaty shadows. "Sweet Primus, what is that thing in your arms?"

Prowl didn't quite know, and that was the problem.

The creature was very slick, but not with scales or any calciferous substance, and seemed to be made entirely of cartilage and muscle: depending on if it was flexing or relaxing, it could goop or squeeze its way into anything. That, Prowl guessed, was how it got onto the ship after the door was closed too tight for a creature even half its size. Otherwise, it was the scale of a Ferrian hornkip, or an earth dog. It sported six short stubby appendages, a muscled tail and a sweet pointed face with two slanted eyes.

"Technically, it's a stowaway. It slipped onto the ship after we landed on an asteroid for an emergency patch. Neither of us are quite certain how and you are fully aware of how Moot's defenses are," Prowl explained. The critter took that moment to chirp proudly, earning a baffled chuckle from the ninjabot before he looked back to Torque. "I was hoping you might identify it for us."

Torque laughed as well, eyeing the creature closely.

"Honey, I'm old, not omniscient," she snorted. "I haven't the slightest file on what it is, but my rule for anything is as follows: don't relax until you find out what it eats."

"A… good rule," Prowl allowed uncertainly, risking a glance at the confident little alien in his lap.

"It's a good place to start," she said, shrugging. Then, seeing the way it twisted under Prowl's attentive servos, she asked: "It's adorable for the moment, even if it does have designs on eating your facial plating off. What is its name?"

"I was favoring Bradbury."

"That's a strange one," Torque said, frowning at the stiff, alien syllables.

"A storyteller from a planet I favored," Prowl said softly, stroking the elegant stretch between its eyes. "It reminds me of one of his tales."

Before his friend could engage her vocalizer again to bid him a hasty but well-intended farewell (a ruckus was brewing to her left), both jumped and looked back when Lockdown shouted from his shop at the top of his vocals, too far away and door-muffled to be totally intelligible, a pledge to dissemble Prowl from head to pede if he named the 'pit-spawned little shaft-sucker, because naming meant attachment, primus damnit, and for the last slaggin' time he _didn't do pets'_.

Torque worked harder than most to smother her laughter, nearly kicking her pedes with the glee of it. Then she winked her approval, said she couldn't think of a better name for it, hoped that it wouldn't devour him in the night and all that jazz, and signed off.

Prowl was left staring at the thing getting cozy in his lap with a bit more concern than he had before and thought perhaps it should find a better place to recharge than his berthroom. At least for… the first few solar-cycles. They would move from there, provided Lockdown didn't find a way to murder it in the night.

On the other hand, perhaps it was wise to keep Bradbury close. Quite close.

* * *

"It won't die and the kid doesn't have any idea what it eats."

"You sound disappointed."

Far from feeling concern for his partner's wellbeing or possible 'prey' status, Torque figured the only reason Lockdown would be interested in what it ate was to be able to deprive the creature of its source of sustenance in an effort to drive it away. The frustrated, ghastly look on the bounty hunter's face confirmed her suspicions. She shrugged, dabbing at her datapad for a few notes.

"Well, turns out I'm no help. I wasn't actually able to find any information on it: mostly folklore and rumors. Normal for that dark part of the galaxy. Apparently no one's been interested enough to catalogue your new friend into the local database." Lockdown looked nonplussed, leaning further back into his chair and toying with his chin. Torque (now in a metal, densely-populated building) frowned at him for a moment. "It's been two weeks, Lockdown, and you haven't chucked it out of the airlock yet. You're actually letting him keep it?"

Lockdown grunted. He didn't want to go into that: if he hadn't admitted his messy little frustration-triggered capitulation outright to Prowl, he certainly wasn't going to give Torque the honor. There was also that weird thing of having the kid happy. He didn't want to go into that either. Unfortunately, the femme also knew him too well.

"Interesting," she exclaimed, brightening. She paused, regarding her friend appraisingly. "Prowl has a knack for domesticating the most impossible of creatures."

"So long as it stays where I can't see it, I don't care."

"I wasn't speaking of Bradbury."

Lockdown gave her a glare that could have melted metal.

"Don't you encourage him," he grumped, still sore that the little misfit had a _name_, which did not bode well at all for the emotional recovery aspect of the 'accidental death' scenario he had been grinding away on for the past week.

"Pets are nice," Torque insisted. "Who knows? Perhaps it may even teach you to share."

"Sure," he scoffed. If Lockdown knew one thing about himself (besides the obvious 'does not play well with others' shtick) it was that he did not share. "Prowl can have all of it."

"But can _it_ have all of Prowl?" Torque asked ominously. Before he could formulate the proper look to give her for that cryptic little nugget, she cocked her auditory unit to something belching from a muffled PA system then waved to him and began to shut down her feed. Moments before the screen went black, she finished off: "Good luck, honey. Don't forget: if you kill it, you'll upset Prowl. And don't try and make it look like an accident, he knows you too well for that. Tread carefully and _try_ to be nice."

Lockdown terminated his side of the connection, huffed and railed for three cycles about how the glitched (and tacky) antique didn't know what the Pit she was on about, then realized with a pang of horror that she was absolutely right. Slowly and carefully, he keeled into the keyboard. He knew there was a reason, now even more than ever, that he didn't do pets.

Pets meant competition.

* * *

Bradbury settled in without a hitch.

Mostly, it drowsed or wandered around like it owned the small ship, flitting inconspicuously out of nooks or crannies before creeping into the middle of whatever Prowl or Lockdown was working on. It moved on feet much akin to black velour tongues, flickering and soft, tail eternally waving in interest. Its favorite hang-out places included Lockdown's head, or even his uppermost windshield: the extra weight was so infinitesimal as compared to his multi-ton girth that it was much like failing to notice a feather on one's shoulder, except that his discoveries were always followed by roaring fits of trying to squish the critter flat.

Otherwise, Bradbury delighted in napping atop Prowl's chassis, tucked into the cranny behind his glass among all the speed-dials and gauges. The little creature's attraction to heat was the only thing they could pin down about their new shipmate, especially considering that they still didn't know what it ate—a fact which had even organic-comfortable Lockdown eying the thing and snarking at inopportune moments, earning himself many a chilly 'Come-Bradbury-we-don't-need-to-listen-to-this' glare and exit from Prowl.

After a few weeks, Bradbury revealed its best talent: song. It expelled smooth little notes when pleased or troubled. They were melodious hitches of breath, vibrating out of the very skin of it, so concise and expressive they had Prowl frowning and smiling at the same time. Every moment, he felt like he found something new and fascinating in his tiny companion.

After it became obvious that Lockdown wasn't going to toss 'Bradbury' to the stars whence he came, there was a week or three of infatuation where Prowl wouldn't let the thing out of his visual field. Even when he wasn't stroking it, he was fervently researching its possible racial identity on his datapad and the lack of information only seemed to inflame his quiet love for the little thing even further. It was only the stunning novelty of the creature when combined with their all-too-familiar environment (it was causing Prowl to see his world in a new light, which was always a treasure) that caused him to be so rapt, but Lockdown couldn't help hating the thing a little when his partner followed it around like a tottering, enthralled Sparkling….and actually _whined_ and _fussed_ when Lockdown tried to present him with a pleasurable physical distraction. Solar-cycles often passed when the two bounty hunters didn't speak to one another, but the fact that Prowl was spending that time with someone—_something_—else made the older mech cranky and more prone to smashing things.

_Then_ there was the unmentionable moment where he had finally pinned the organic-loving little bike to his berth and was well on his way to blowing both their breakers when 'Bradbury' scaled their scraping tangle and proceeded to burst into song atop his head, getting as much of a kick from the luscious heat as they were. Prowl had to talk _a lot_ to keep his partner from killing it that day. The fact that he couldn't keep from chuckling in-between his eloquent pleas (and didn't seem the least bit upset at the interruption) made the situation a whole lot more murder-worthy than it should have been.

The next time he tried anything, however, Lockdown made sure to shut the goddamn door.

Keen on survival, Bradbury picked up things quickly. It never bothered Prowl when he was meditating, but was first (and only) in line for a cuddle the moment he came out of his trance. Also, finding the little alien quick to engage in mimicry, the ninjabot taught it songs during their dull en route days, leading it along note by note like a trail of sonar treats. Bradbury could soon trill songs Prowl had recorded or downloaded before leaving Earth, or taken to in the times since. After a few weeks, it learned that Lockdown's shop was off-limits except when it was safe in Prowl's lap—a quick, threatening pass of the bounty hunter's chainsaw was all the reinforcement it needed for that lesson. It thrilled Prowl beyond words to have a little nugget of eager intellect sitting in front of him, waiting for him after he returned from a mission, willing to grow and adapt at the nudge of his digits. The future seemed bright and full of pleased little melodies.

Then, one solar-cycle months later, Bradbury was gone.

Prowl, of course, searched the ship. He pawed through boxes. He stuck his head into metal magazines and turned on his night vision, daring to half-hum a tune in the hopes of having it cooed out of a nearby corner. No luck. Finally, he went to the bridge.

"Lockdown?" When his partner grunted, he asked, "Have you seen Bradbury?"

Lockdown turned to give him a look that said even if he _had_ seen it, he would've been too busy ignoring and hating it to notice. Prowl frowned. Pressured by his partner's silence, Lockdown grunted something about organics taking off from time to time, it was nothing to get cranked up about, but Prowl pestered him about it (with polite, anxious requests that annoyed him more than being poked in the back) until he gave in. A scan of the ship, tuned up after that slight stowaway episode with Blackarachnia, revealed no organic lifeforms onboard and affirmed Prowl's dark suspicions. Somehow, someway, during the night, the little creature had jumped ship. His pet was gone.

This realization left Prowl stranded in the middle of the bridge, wondering what in the universe he was supposed to be feeling besides delicately lost. The little friend he had poured so much time and energy into had been sucked into the void of the Outer World. Lockdown, on the other hand, was nothing but relieved. He drove on with his work, trolling the Feed with a slight smile. When he realized his partner was standing and staring out the window like he'd been gutted and reverse engineered, he creaked back and forth and glanced up for a good cycle or three before offering what he thought was a definite positive point.

"Could'a gone off to die."

Prowl sighed deeply.

"I hope not," he murmured to the glass. Trying to think of the last planet they had been on; where it was now, how it would get along on its own.

"Loosen up, kid. You didn't even know what it was. Could've swallowed your Spark in the night," Lockdown muttered, typing and tapping. Prowl shook his head. Lockdown frowned somewhat, gears and insides clicking uncomfortably when Prowl turned and walked off. "Where you goin'?"

"My room," he said heavily.

Lockdown watched him go, then continued to frown at the motionless screen for the next half megacycle. He would have been vindicated in knowing that their so-called 'Bradbury' actually had consumptive intentions on his partner: a surface scan of Prowl would have revealed patchy wear on his outer polish, where the creature had worn at the ethyl-acetate laden gloss with its acidic probiscus while the ninjabot was in recharge. The chemical was a vital part of its diet, lending it a healthy shine; Bradbury had fed on the former Autobot for all nine months of its stay, but was eventually forced to move when its health began to wane, squeezing out of the airlock on their last docking in order to seek new prey.

Yes, Lockdown had known all along, or known _enough_. That, however, did little to change the fact that his partner was a miserable lump of patchy-polished mech who wasn't scheduled to leave his room for the next few megacycles of intense moping… and worst of all, Lockdown almost felt compelled to _do_ something about it.

Almost. Maybe.

…Damn.

* * *

The following week, Prowl once again found something outside his door. It was a small plant bursting up from a pot, reminiscent of the tough-centered, soft-branching organic forms on earth, but did not wither in the cold space air of the ship. Curious. It was entrancing in its delicacy: the carefully formed branches and foliage caught every bit of red from Moot's backup lighting, obviously the work of a craftsman but still quite organic. Prowl fondled it blankly for a bare moment before taking it into the bridge, then into the shop. When Lockdown noticed him at the door, holding the plant like a protoform, the bounty hunter motioned over his spiked shoulder.

"Freebie from a deal. 'Bot grows 'em on the other side of the Omega star cluster. Tossed one in when I cut my price. They don't need atmosphere to grow: get somethin' from rocks, or...eh. Point is, it won't eat you."

It was then that Prowl knew this was a special gift.

Of course, there was a bit of reading-in to that: the fact that Lockdown felt forced to mention the pointedly casual means of procuring the item meant that he had actually made an effort to get it (whereas if things had truly happened the way he had said, he would have felt guiltless in not explaining a bit of it, justified in his own noncommittal actions) and the fact that he had left it outside Prowl's door rather than tossing it at him in person communicated a certain level of shyness and concern as to how the gift would be taken—which indicated a personal stake in the gifting.

A century and a half of observation and miscommunication had not gone to waste on Prowl. Calculating all this with a speed gifted only by decades of practice, the ninjabot turned the plant over in his servos and felt a slow, warm smile take not only his face but his Spark.

"Why?" he asked softly. Lockdown looked back and shrugged.

"It ain't a pet."


	33. Hunt

A/N: SO. Canon scruples. Ratchet's 'The One Bot It Was Made For' Specialness aside, there can't be JUST ONE EMP-generator in the world. It's too useful of a tool to be anything but universal, so Lockdown DEFINITELY has another one stuffed away somewhere. Secondly. Bit of groping around and mature-ish Spark-sexual material in the middle, so, kiddies? Go watch cartoons. (… after you've read it XD) Alternate smut version to be found at AFFnet!

Also, Prowl dominating Lockdown is quite possibly the hottest thing ever. EVER. (Also-also, they are **NOT merging**. Nuuu. It's just Spark-play and neither have ever bared their Sparks before or let them be fiddled to death :D keekee.)

Oh my Primus. They are so, so in love. :dies:

(Also, please ignore my Fake Alien Words and the Fake Molecular-Scale Biological Details. They belong to the It Doesn't Matter club, which is a happy affiliate of the Demz Is Lazy club.)

* * *

Hunt

* * *

The planet was quiet. Very quiet.

Since the natural continuation of that thought-train included 'suspicious silence in suspicious excess', Lockdown spent the majority of the first megacycle on the aforementioned (partner-selected) planet glaring around at the dense foliage as though daring it to move _less_ in the non-existent wind. The air was uncomfortably close, like a slick organic tongue pressing into his armor niches, and laden with nitrogen beyond that. Lockdown didn't like excess amounts of nitrogen in sweltering, excessively-suspiciously quiet environments, especially when he didn't know what was lurking on the other side of that organic fortress and Pit, he hated jungles in the first place.

This, of course, was barely taking into account that Prowl had dragged him there, wouldn't give up until he stepped outside the ship (browbeating him over a recent 'customer service' incident he sadly retained in full detail, despite the static-edged memory gap of the previous night), and currently _would—not—shut--up._

Being horridly conscientious, Prowl tried to tell him that he had specifically chosen the planet for its conspicuous lack of large predators: this ball of knotted green filth, deserving nothing more than a number and a quadrant, was (un-)known for an array of small, peaceful organics. Whether through evolution or some sort of centuries-ago selective extinction, it had no semblance of a secondary consumer or carnivorous race. The result was a blameless lack of fear from every colorful critter in the undergrowth and canopy alike, who had all gotten a very good, gutsy look at them upon arriving in their 'huge', black-red rumbling ship. The planet was small, out-of-the-way and unique due to its limited inhabitants. The nitrogen-heavy atmosphere would choke most things sporting a pulse, so it wasn't exactly a tourist spot, but those with electropulses got on quite well in its exotic acid-green foliage—if his name was Prowl.

Oh, how well his Prowl was getting on.

"Lockdown. Lockdown, look."

Lockdown onlined one optic, held the connection long enough to see a yellow and purple _thing_ swoop overhead, then settled back with a blind and apathetic grunt. He could feel Prowl frowning at him from up on his little Zen-rock perch and felt a certain measure of gritty, juvenile pride that his crusty swagger could hold up to the darkest hurtle the kid could throw at him. He'd thought it was bad before—Prowl had done some awful weird things in their time, including but not limited to pets, hugs and apologies—but this was an all-time low and _still_ he managed to get his way.

At the moment, his 'way' was limited to 'not giving Prowl the satisfaction', but still, he was gettin' it.

Prowl, meanwhile, was not impressed. He picked up a small, Chihuahua-sized rock, lobbed it at his partner's chassis and was fully prepared with a disenchanted glower (complete with folded arms and a severe visor) when Lockdown fake-rebooted with a dull noise of surprise.

"I would appreciate it if you wouldn't feign recharge while I attempt to expand your horizons," he sniffed.

"You just said I had to be here," the other muttered, throwing him a _look_. "Didn't say a word 'bout how I had to spend the time."

He propped himself up and scuffed at his chassis, looking for a dent, then went right back to laying down in the thick ground-moss. His indolent (yet somehow _smug_ and _righteous_) repose and uncaring motor-buzz clearly said, 'Now you're just gettin' picky.' Asking for polite conduct from the unsociable mech was often considered 'picky', yes, but it had never quite been an issue in the past—then again, Prowl had never before attempted to force Lockdown to do anything he didn't want to. Prowl's engine harumphed.

"Foolish, not to negotiate the terms of your functional status," Prowl groused to the jungle, knowing even if he had done so, he could never, ever ask the surly mech for his Spark-felt _compliance_. That was something that had to be tricked out and the ninjabot found his deviousness had run dry after the initial negotiation: now he was simply stuck with an incredibly stubborn, vindictive mech whom he regretted ever trying to conquer, even if abandoning him (rather, leaving him to go back to the ship and gloat) seemed a surrender too huge and crippling to consider. Prowl vented a bit of air, gesturing to the suspiciously-quiet jungle with a gloomy face.

"It is a near-crime to ignore a habitat so full of life and detail. You could, at the very least, attempt to pay attention to what lies around you. Simply… observe?"

"Not in the terms, kid," Lockdown huffed, waving all of _nature_ away with a single sloppy motion. "I'm here 'cos of your requirements, not the scenery. Now, hold on—lemme do one more thing and you can talk your little Spark out…"

Prowl almost dared to be hopeful. Lockdown often gave in right when the situation seemed darkest. Then he heard the signature squeal-click of offlined audios ricochet in the thick air and he sighed so deeply he nearly decompressed. The ninjabot watched the other mech settle back for a klik, nosing his spiked back into the soft dirt, then felt a little of his cleverness return to oil his gears. He accessed his wireless.

_I wouldn't do that._

Lockdown received the text, then, half-glaring at the folded-up ninjabot, he onlined his audios. Prowl smirked.

"I haven't told you about the soil."

There was a reason Prowl was sitting on a rock.

Or so it seemed to Lockdown, who hurriedly heaved himself to his pedes and attempted to shake clods of the stuff off his back, putting on a very enjoyable show for his partner. When the bounty hunter was certain he had cleared his person of the probably-armor-eating-acidic-corrosive-mess-and-Primus-he-hated-jungles-slag, he stomped to a halt and, plating warm from the spook, glared at the young mech.

"Well?" Lockdown hissed, wanting very much to know what he had just danced off. Prowl shrugged and smiled almost sunnily.

"Inert. Harmless in chemical makeup," he preened. "Perfectly suited for the local plantlife, due to the continued nourishment of decomposing undergrowth."

Lockdown twitched.

"I only thought to warn you," Prowl added solicitously, "so you did not mistakenly crush some poor germinating plant."

The bounty hunter might have been uncertain as to the extent of it before, but it was now official. Nature_ blew_.

Moreso, the fact that Prowl was the only one of the two of them who was truly knowledgeable about the planet, or at least knew all of its dangers _if they existed_, put Lockdown at a serious (or at least seriously irking) disadvantage. The ninjabot was obviously not above holding invisible threats above his partner in order to force his compliance or at least make his existence a little more miserable than the planet already allowed. The huge mech sat back down with an unhappy noise, considering transforming and just perching himself somewhere and blasting music to piss off small animals... preferably on a rock, just in case Prowl was lying about the dirt thing.

Prowl, pleased with his own tryst with immaturity, looked out on the beautiful, vibrant jungle and had a thought. After a few cycles of fleshing it out, one servo to his chin, it certainly seemed the only thing that would truly unite the two of them in this scenario and make their (eighteen megacycle) stay at all enjoyable. A… channel of sorts for Lockdown's future love of nature to function through. Smiling anew, Prowl turned to his partner.

"Perhaps you would take better to the environment if it were an arena of sorts?" he asked lightly, gesturing at the canopy.

Missing the smooth, sure note in the other's vocals, Lockdown began to mutter something very derogatory and impatient to properly convey his unconditional lack of cooperation with _anything_ Prowl had in mind, but was interrupted by a sudden movement to his left. He glared around, following the black blur, and found Prowl standing at the cusp of the jungle, dwarfed by the huge trees. Looking back once, visor flashing a meaningful electric blue unmatched by any local flora, the ninjabot vanished into the thick trees with a hushed ripple-rustle of green. Propping himself up, Lockdown peered after him, half-interested in this new stealthy development and what the kid was promising by his words and flourishing exit: a hunt. Though it was their calling in function, never had they reached to hunting one another. Surprising, that they hadn't thought of it before, either for training or recreation.

Then again, they weren't exactly evenly matched. Lockdown had been at the game far, far longer than Prowl had and was liking his chances at this point. He snorted. Kid was getting cockier every solar-cycle. Proposing a hunt…to _him_?

Still, he was wary—and, above all, sick of dripping, steaming, squawking, squishing _nature_. After so long stomping around in the general area of the ship, abiding the gag of tiny mud pits as the warm fetid stuff welled underneath his pedes, he had no desire to plunge into the sticky heart of things and muck his tires up. He could only imagine the brambles and crunchy botanical bits that would find wire-laced homes in his armor-chinks.

He heaved himself upright and waited, standing in front of the wall of trees. Prowl was not bluffing: Lockdown couldn't register as much as an anticipatory rustle from the jungle. He meant to do this.

"You know me, kid. I don't play for free," the bounty hunter yelled into the green, grinding his hook-tip along his leg in mild aggravation. Then his comm beeped and Prowl's voice, teasing and cool, was soft in his head.

"There will be… a reward, if you manage to catch me."

Pause.

"Your terms."

Lockdown's optics widened so severely they nearly cracked, engine revving at those magic words.

Smiling an invisible, knowing smile, Prowl shut off his commlink—truly disabled it, a sensory signal of hot equipment winking out in Lockdown's periphery—and Lockdown followed suit, flicking his internals in the proper sequence. He smirked as the utter black-enameled silence filled his head, lacking even of a pulsing subliminal feed waiting to be woken with a techno-mechanical poke. This would be… distracting, not to mention rewarding: if the arrogant little ninjabot was foolish enough to promise him a blank check in way of rewards, he truly had learned nothing about his partner in all 150-plus stellar-cycles of business. Mistake upon mistake.

True, the stodgy old bounty hunter needed serious motivation to consider stepping foot inside the jungle, but this? The turn-around from 'worst day ever' to 'best prospective night ever' nearly sent him spinning, but managed to propel him past the first wall of green with a roar of his engine. This hunt was _his_.

"You'd better do more than run, kid," he rumbled to himself with vocals as wicked as spikes, curved with expectation, and gave himself to the jungle.

* * *

All of the hunter's time in business had lengthened his patience to an obscene degree and the tension generated by time sweetened the eventual satisfaction of the final bag, but he found that hunting his partner was entirely different from his usual fare. Lockdown first trolled the periphery, keeping close to the ship while he could, then forced himself into the thick of things. He found where all the noise had gone: once inside the jungle and past the siege wall of waxy leaves, the entire place vibrated with a squeaking undercurrent of squawks and chirps, only adding to the hot weight in the air. Lusty condensation gathering on his red windshield, he plodded on, sensors peaked for any sign of the small mech.

A few times, he managed to catch sight of Prowl. Sight, however, was less than reliable, as the kid's damn holographic projector seemed to be at mass effectiveness in the humid jungle air. His holograms had a dew-spawned luster and an edge to them that had Lockdown bolting after them instantly, even when he registered the lack of noise from underneath the ninjabot's pedes. Within kliks, the image slurped into nothingness; nothing but steaming jungle and the mewling buzz of hidden organics, and Prowl was _gone_.

At least twice, Prowl actually let him get close enough—or was startled into it, his growling ego said—to snap into alt mode and tear off into the dark undergrowth. Lockdown, oil rushing in his lines, transformed and pursued full throttle, so focused on the slick little silhouette ahead of him that he failed to pay due mind to the terrain (which even then was giving his textured tires and bulky body a turn) and so nearly dented his fender while plunging after Prowl. The little 'bot lead him around in an aggravating circle, then zipped off in a sharp turn. Lockdown dug in with his brakes and roared after him… straight into two trees that the ninjabot had been skinny enough to mow between.

_Crunch_.

Popping out of his alt-mode with an agonized noise and a wail of springs, he hunched and nursed his pedes and one cracked headlight for a good five cycles, which gave Prowl an unspeakable amount of ground on him—that is, if Prowl was doing nothing but running.

Lockdown knew the feeling of a predator. It was careful, to be certain—even conscientious, as there were other things to consider besides the prize--but suffused with an excitement and an ease of execution that came from flawless, striding dominance. Lockdown knew that feeling inside and out. He'd thrived on it for millennia, and to that day nothing turned him on more than winning by crushing another into the dirt with nothing but skill.

Unfortunately, this feeling was not so. Somewhere along the line—between the third rustle that actually made him turn to glare into a clutch of bushes and the fizzle of something that wasn't a comm-call—the hard line of roles began to dissolve. Proposed pedator and proposed prey blurred. Prowl was not simply running, that much he knew for certain, and it made him on edge to know that he was dealing with proactive prey.

Within two megacycles of crashing around in the critter-stuffed terrain, Lockdown was more than slightly pissed, perhaps at the fact he was getting slightly-unspeakably _uneasy_ as the hunt dragged on and still the jungle didn't betray Prowl with a snap of a twig or a thick rustle. The damned ninjabot was a spectre in the trees. He had to remind himself, so grudgingly, that the kid was good at what they did and was his partner for a reason. Their style differences shone here: Lockdown could execute stealth, but once he attacked, it was in a raging screech of tires and smoke. He gave himself away then relied on a brutal advance to stun his target. Prowl, however, could both track and execute an attack in flawless stealth. Prowl's invisibility was the deciding factor here and he needed some sort of upper hand over the kid to bring this in nice and clean.

After all, Prowl had made generous use of his holograms and hadn't stated any conditions under which his capture had to be made—which gave the bounty hunter a Pit of a lot of options he wasn't the least bit averse to. Not if it would get him that blank check and a sweet ego boost. Lockdown half-smirked and leaned against a huge tree, pondering a moment before running his sole servo over his cloaking modification. Peering around at the jungle, he equipped it then flipped it on, (slightly dirty) victory assured.

Right as he shimmered out of sight, however, a limb snapped, a tree rustled and, before he could whirl to shoot or grab, a meaty blast of buzzing light hit him from behind, knocking the proverbial electric breath out of his circuits in one jarring slam. Red optics doused, the mammoth mech was out before he hit the ground. He did so with a tree-shaking impact, core noise reduced to an anxious wheeze as his innards coasted down into shock-stasis, blank white face turned to the side in the leafy undergrowth.

Unseen, two black pedes touched down by the bounty hunter's shoulder and his prey's mouth, hidden by a long feral face shield, twitched into a smile.

* * *

Rebooting from an EM-blast was something that Lockdown hadn't experienced very often but it was uncomfortable enough that he couldn't help but know exactly what had downed him when he came-to. The sticky, aching gasp-chug of his systems was enough of a tip-off and the knowledge only increased his consternation when he was fully dragged back to the world of the online. His every component ached; his optical sensors conducted a full-blown battle behind their red glassing, fighting to adjust his light-sensitivity and his resolution and his depth perception all at once after the nasty surge. His body _hated_ him.

And here the kid told him the planet wasn't dangerous. Obviously, the unseen locals were well-equipped enough to deal with invading robotic beings who tore up their precious natural habitat with their games. Shock and ire of the attack aside, Lockdown didn't take a shine to being _dealt_ with… but nothing else seemed to be wrong with him. Nonetheless, he fully intended to emergency-comm Prowl the second he could stand up and tell him the hunt was over; that somehow, these slaggers had EM generators and the deal was off. At least it would get him off the damn planet a few megacycles earlier than planned.

He vented some cool, weak air, already regretting the loss of Prowl's blank check, then tried to get up. His situation, already puny, only worsened. Because he couldn't.

Get up, that is.

He simply… stopped about a foot from the ground, no matter how many times he blearily strained upwards. Refreshing his optics viciously to combat the feedback in his audios, realizing that he might well be _restrained_, he looked down and froze. Long, thick vines were twined and knotted around each of his limbs, each one leading back to a very thick tree in four distinct directions. Not only that, he realized with a start, a ditch in the dirt had been carved out for his back so that he lay utterly flat on the jungle floor. Flat, spread-eagled and exposed.

…Make that unseen, sadistic and possibly technology-starved locals with a penchant for painful disassembly of anything they didn't understand.

Spark flaring, Lockdown cursed through his gapped dentals, struggling briefly with the bonds and arching against the damp ground. He continued like this for a murderous five cycles, cursing his decision to leave his chain-saw mod back on the ship and glaring around at the panorama of steaming, now-threatening jungle as though daring a simian creature to lurch out with a wrench in hand. He only stopped thrashing, engine dying in one gulp, when Prowl walked into his line of vision, tossing aside some spare vine.

He stared.

"Unfortunate," the ninjabot said crisply, retracting Lockdown's EMP modification into his glossy forearm, "that you did not take the time to negotiate the conditions of your own capture."

Lockdown's jaw was on the floor. So was the rest of him, but his jaw more than everything else combined. The situation refused to make sense: the EMP generator only worsened it. He was flat and bound and damn, but his processor _hurt_ and Prowl was just…standing there. Finally, forced to _comprehend_ the ninjabot in front of him, who was regarding him most comfortably from behind that blue visor, he managed to blurt out:

"This wasn't part'a the deal."

"I realize this. I say again: how unfortunate."

His partner's tone, all curling lips and slick vocals, was enough to make Lockdown's recently-recovered systems flinch. But it was true, it dawned on him: his master negotiating skills had been trumped. The possibility of his own capture hadn't been in the listed conditions, so he hadn't taken the time to even block out what could and could not happen—including, apparently, losses of dignity. But of course, that was operating on the assumption that this ante-upped game of tag was even to be held to rules.

If it was, Prowl's sardonic look let him know that he had broken the rules first with his cloak stunt. He couldn't stand the conceited justification in the other's long face—or the face itself, or the punky, insulting little 'bot it belonged to. Growling, giving up on defending or reasoning or whatever the Pit he was doing, Lockdown resumed straining at the vines, more than expecting four thick snaps once he put the full snarl of his motor behind it--but they did not give. They only creaked and, being expertly tied, did not tighten viciously on his wrists and pede-ridges with the strain. Prowl smiled and dropped down by him, knees hitting the soft dirt, and bent over his upturned and aghast face.

"Rectifineo suprifi," he breathed, visor shining. "Fascinating structure. Some of the strongest material known to modern biology, only achieved by rigid chains of cellulose molecules fused together by lignin. A super-fiber, if you will."

With the way the ninjabot was staring at him and going on in molecular-scale detail about alien foliage, there were only two options here: that Prowl had truly come unhinged and meant to murder him, or this was a game. When Prowl dipped down to scrape his open mouth over his lip-plating, flooding the hunter's mouth with hot air and twirling a digit over his chassis, the creamy distinction was made. The bounty hunter was slow to grin—conflicted as he was by the taut arrest of his limbs—but when he did, it was the filthiest expression he'd ever made.

Yeah, he knew what the kid wanted. Whether or not he was going to get it the _way_ he wanted it…

"You need help, ninjabot," Lockdown said appreciatively, still continuing to tug doggedly at the vines as Prowl leant further over him, one servo grazing his abdominal plating.

"Then we are two of a kind. You too could use some… assistance," Prowl responded in a low, warm flutter of his vocals that could only be described as a _purr_.

Reconciling the term with _Prowl_ took a while—a while that he did not have as Prowl's wandering grip reached down to toy with the edges of his pelvic plating for but a spare moment before grinding his digits over the hunter's groin and nuzzling fiercely against his spiked neck. Lockdown hissed and Prowl shifted up and nipped his lips, chuckling in an unnervingly silky manner. His partner twitched and turned to glare at the lithe ninjabot, optics reduced to ruby slits.

"You knocked me out," Lockdown hissed suddenly, far too late in the game. Prowl's visor thinned in pleasure, seeming to track his partner's piteously delayed thought processes (and cramped disbelief) with glee. This, clearly, was the last thing he expected from such a situation and that gave Prowl more satisfaction than he could put into words.

"Then bound you, servo and pede," he said almost kindly, straight face only enhancing his evil presence. "Is there anything else you need clarified before I start?"

"…When are you going to let me up?"

"When I finish."

"The first limb you free'll be the one that offlines you," Lockdown said uncertainly, optics locked on Prowl's visor as though waiting for a slip-up. The younger mech's unflinching comfort seemed to give Lockdown more of a turn than he bargained for; his shock only worsened when Prowl against his white cheek and purred all the way down to his engine.

"Then perhaps I will not let you up at all. It all depends on your behavior." He smirked, adding lightly, "We are, after all, contracted for fifteen-point-seven-five more megacycles on this planet, according to you. Enough time to tame you, I think."

"_Kid_," Lockdown roared, outrage solidifying into a formidable fire that fueled another rash of struggles, intent on bursting free and breaking some part of Prowl and _teaching him what was what_. Most crashed to a halt when Prowl vaulted him in a feline motion and straddled his waist, gleaming with the grinding arrogance of his capture. The fact that he had bested his partner through skill and dominated him in neutral territory—it lit his Spark with a lusty, half-insane hiss. Bending forward, the small mech seized Lockdown's face and kissed him soundly, breezing past the infuriated twist of the other's mouth beneath his.

Within a few cycles he managed to gain reciprocation in some small part, because Lockdown, ever the opportunist, figured (quite wrathfully) that being invasively kissed while tied up was a mite better than resisting invasive kisses while tied up. Even then, he attempted to fight back, peevishly biting at Prowl's lips hard enough to dent.

"Behavior," Prowl breathed into his mouth, then returned the pinching favor, forcing a stung grunt from his partner. His right servo swirled and petted down the other's scratched-up black chassis until he reached the plating right above Lockdown's Spark.

"Crack your chamber."

Lockdown's growl, angry and short, was enough of an answer. Prowl had no witty, coaxing insult to combat it. Instead, optics flashing behind his visor, he reached down, located the _warm_ seam of his outer chassis plating and, smiling, forced his digits into the hot, crackling space. Lockdown went taut, arching when Prowl went deeper, tips scraping against the other's Spark chamber. The growl that came after was just as angry as before—more outraged if anything—but underscored with definite vibrating arousal.

Prowl had long ago learned that gall and power-plays impressed and enticed the time-hardened mech more than any sultry act… and this was about as impudent an act as a 'bot could commit. He pushed along the slit and evoked another grudging quiver, ignoring the pinch of the two (similarly very angry) chassis panels on his dermaplating as they tried to close and blot out the reddish phosphorescence of his partner's Spark.

Regardless of the struggle, regardless of the insulting responses, Lockdown's plating was hot. Quite hot.

"Fascinating." Prowl leaned forward, nudging close to the tortured up-down movement of the other's chassis and commenting softly: "I wasn't aware you could enjoy any act of domination but your own."

"I'm warnin' you, kid," the bounty hunter rasped, vocals both weak and unstable—as though he might collapse or lash out again, his entire sizzling neural network sucked up in the rough pressure at the center of his chassis.

"A warning it only pertinent if something follows it," Prowl reminded him, digging his digits in for another stroke. "You, my partner, are tragically stationary—and bluffing more than your wont."

When Lockdown only snarled—obviously taking his jibes and domination as an acidic personal affront—Prowl let himself soften. He did, for all his want of heady control, want this to be enjoyable. He withdrew his invasion (the hard-won niche disappeared with a brusque snap) and took to petting the plating instead, pressing his mouth along the other's pale jaw. The old bounty hunter seemed to sense the shift; the vines stopped creaking. He exhaled, shuddering on a minute scale and letting his tensors go slack. Prowl pressed his servo over his partner's pulsing Spark, melting him further.

"Cooperate, Lockdown," he whispered after a long moment, lips scraping his black auditory unit. "Trust opens one up to greater pleasures."

"Knocking me out and trussing me up," Lockdown grunted after a moment, glaring up at him with a conflicted expression. "Y'got a funny way of getting me to trust you."

"Whatever it takes to get the job done," the ninjabot quipped, quirking an optic ridge. Short and sudden, Lockdown's engine revved, the sentence evoking untold amounts of memories: some of them strange, most of them pleasurable, all of them… swaying.

One hundred and fifty stellar-cycles was a long, long time.

Cycles passed, bearing nothing but the noises of the jungle surrounding them and the waning of a fierce expression on Lockdown's gaunt face. Then, slowly, every click of gears audible, his chassis panels slid back and Prowl smiled.

* * *

It was different, to be sure, but Lockdown's trust was more than rewarded. After a half megacycle of the exotic torture, the by-then-insane bounty hunter managed to break free in a supermechanical moment and proceed to do horrible, entirely necessary things to his startled partner that evoked a heat-flushed howl or seven. Prowl, at the least, was very glad that the planet didn't boast any variety of animal that could be offended by screams of passion; otherwise, he was quite sure they would have had the entire continent waiting for them with pitchforks upon rebooting.

They lay after, Lockdown's fans blowing full blast. The utter erotic calamity that ensued was far too gratifying for Lockdown to resent Prowl's altogether resent-able method of execution after the ninjabot freed his legs from the vines—and somewhere, as always, he slaggin' loved the kid's style and punk for even daring to tie him up. How had Earth _held_ the little bastard before he got to him? The first thing he did once properly settled and recovered from the girder-rattling event (aside from slapping Prowl on the aft) was nearly wear his vocals out laughing, bursting with disbelief and the healthy exhaustion of his Spark. Prowl regarded him lazily from the hammock of his own arms, looking for all the world like a sunning feline—or a sunning Bradbury.

"Didn't think y'had it in you," Lockdown rumbled finally, knocking his servo against Prowl's still-warm chassis.

"I did not, this morning," Prowl murmured curiously, still drowsy and heat-swooned: the state, a rare and pliant loss of 'decorum' after intimacy, seemed prolonged only when Prowl lay against his partner's body. The little bike was warm and happy, which in turn made Lockdown warmer and happier. Both resounded with the other, sharing heat and vibration. "Things simply… went downhill--perhaps after you spurned me so rudely."

"You been in space too long, darlin'. Your directions are glitched: what you call downhill, I call uphill," he chuckled, knowing full well that Prowl was implying the whole mess was his fault. He meandered his knuckles against the ninjabot's waist affectionately. "Good form."

"Thank you."

They lay on the ground together for a long, quiet moment, Prowl aspirating soothingly with his sated Spark glowing near—towards—Lockdown's. Part of him desired to be locked like this for long, warm megacycles, soaking in the tender aftershocks of what had passed between them in such a beautiful environment, but after spending a bit longer curled against the gigantic mech, Prowl looked up and tapped him.

"You may return to the ship," he allowed with a rare, sweet mixture of loftiness and sincerity. The bike twirled a digit over Lockdown's chassis. "You have paid your penance."

"Pit, if that's penance, you're my new religion," Lockdown leered, capturing his partner's wandering servo and nipping at the wires in his delicate carpal joint, baring his dentals roguishly. "What else can I do t'piss you off?"

Lockdown knew enough about his partner to know when he was rolling his optics behind that visor, but it was satisfying to see the smirk anyways. He vented a gust of toasty air in surprise when Prowl shifted, leaned close and pressed something suspiciously like a kiss to his throat, then lifted himself to his soundless, sleek pedes and walked off--surely to meditate or do whatever dignified ninjabots did after rousing, filthy interfacing. The bounty hunter nearly guffawed at the contrast of it all, tracking Prowl with his optics until the bot was out of his visual field, then rolled over in the nice _considerate_ little hollow his partner had dug for him and stared up at the sunlight-pierced canopy. The miserable dirt-smear planet was still both miserable and dirt-smeary, and still laden with nitrogen beyond that, but the pleasure and radiating confidence in his chassis allowed him to judge nature as possibly worth his while if Prowl got off on it as much as this.

Looking at it that way, he kinda liked nature. Y'know, purely as an aphrodisiac.

He drowsed for a while, remembering they still had fifteen-some-odd megacycles to burn...even if the fact couldn't possibly annoy him as much as it did a megacycle ago. He shut off his chronometer for good measure, knowing that to watch the cycles tick by would drive him out of his processor, and settled back with a comfy grunt. The jungle carried on around him, with small squeaks and purrs. He didn't know how long he spent like that, but it couldn't have been long.

No, not long at all--then he heard the kid yell.

The cry came from his left, far, far off into the matted green jungle and Lockdown was on his pedes before it dissolved into the thick air. He froze, servo clenching. It was a mark of many colors that he didn't run off instantly: he respected the other mech to the point that the idea of 'rescue' was hardly applicable to Prowl. He trusted the other's skill too much to doubt the little ninjabot. He probably just fell out a tree. Absently sampling the air for chemicals, Lockdown shouted Prowl's name over the aggravated growl of his motor. No answer.

The ruckus went on, punctuated by the staticky echoes of what must have been a branch rustling and snapping. Maybe Prowl yelled again—his name, this time--or maybe it was just an animal. A… very large small animal.

Thinking himself more than mildly idiotic, he tried his commlink while jogging towards the source of the sound. He wouldn't, normally—never—but he had a bad, squeezed feeling in his Spark, which had begun to flicker fitfully of its own accord. He reached for Prowl with the comm. His bad feeling was well-deserved: the line was dead. Flat as asphalt and twice as black.

Lockdown's Spark clenched painfully and prematurely, because he remembered in a flash that both of them had disabled their commlinks to make the hunt more challenging. Cursing himself for his slip and his current probably-useless frenzy (Prowl would never shout for him, arrogant little bike), he punched at the proper internal switches, engine growling. It took him five kliks to reboot his comm-line and he used every picoklik of that running towards the sound and Prowl, slapping low-hanging branches and vines out of the way.

Once the connection kicked in he tried to reach his partner, willing the pulse of invisible electricity deep into the tangled, primitive jungle, but all he got was the triple-beep of a dead connection. Not just a dead line, but no reception.

It didn't make sense, just like finding himself knocked out and tied up didn't make sense, and he kept waiting for Prowl to jump out at him. He waited, and ran, and pushed out into the foliage only to glare around at the next clearing only to _run more_, then slam into alt mode and tear over a shallow river, knowing all along—with a cold weight, a barely-repressed tremor—that this wasn't his style. That Prowl wouldn't do this. Within cycles he was shaking madly and burning down to his core, all in the name of another mech--for someone else still warm with the touch of his Spark--but that fact was nothing in the face of the fact that Prowl did not jump out. Prowl did not come back and there was nothing for miles but creaking, steaming, empty jungle and two golden shuriken lodged in a scarred tree.

He was gone.


	34. Gone

* * *

Gone

* * *

The first thing he did—or the last thing he did, after megacycles and megacycles of crashing through the jungle, half-mad with the endless green and the utter gaping absence of any touchable scrap of lustrous black no matter how many featureless tree-walls he tore through, _no Prowl no Prowl_--was call Torque. He paced in front of the commscreen for cycles before she answered, grinding the tip of his hook across his thigh and digging in, digging in--grounding himself with small, methodical gouges into his neural network, leaving mark after mark. Anything to keep him from going into shock.

_He_ was still out there, somewhere, and Torque finally opened the connection with an open-mouthed frown; Lockdown didn't give her a chance.

"He's gone."

No reaction. She just stared at him, uncomprehending of the choking swirl and drag and heave that composed his internal rhythm; the megacycles spent in disbelief and something so close to terror, each one stripping him of some vital system until he was nothing but caving girders.

Prowl was gone.

"What do you mean?" Torque demanded, feed rattling and jerking drunkenly as she settled it on the ground and went to her knees, optics wide. He aspirated, short and sharp, clenching his servo.

"He's… he's just gone. Disappeared."

Then she understood—or she knew enough about him to know what was needed.

She didn't waste time asking him what anyone would have: whether Prowl had simply left him. Him, the brute; him, the antisocial monster, so unsuited for his reserved foil. She knew that no circumstances, physical or emotional, would separate Prowl from his partner, which left them, aching, with only one possibility and brutally limited time to accept it and move. She made a weak, stricken noise, pressing her face into her clenched servos and channeling Lockdown's nauseating outpouring of dumb, blind fear galaxies away--but only for a moment.

"How long ago and where?" she mustered, optics blazing cruel yellow.

"Four megacycles ago, some dirt-ball planet just south of the Attrenian divide. I can wire you the coordinates," Lockdown hissed thickly. Before she could attack him for the bleeding time lapse (he wouldn't let her, not when every cycle of it was a gash in his chronometer and spark and the _distance--_), he pressed on. "I only stopped lookin' for him ten cycles ago. The place is empty as Pit, nothin' but jungle and—frag, I must've torn that organic cesspool top to bottom, _he ain't there_."

"That doesn't make any—" she cursed, digging her digits into her neck, clawing for _facts_. "You say the planet was uninhabited?"

"I'm still on it. I ran a surface-scan, nothing but bite-sized organics for—for the whole _continent_ and nobody can dig through that tangle at anything more than a crawl. If he's here, he's on the ground with his fraggin' organic pals_._" Lockdown slammed his hook across the back of his chair, leaving an arc of sparks and a slash, roaring, "Prowl picked it 'cos of that, kid knew it was safe! Nothin' on that planet could've brought him down, Torque, you slaggin' _know_ him."

"I know, I know," she muttered, processor grinding away on the dense, confounding _something_ that gave off the heat behind her optics. Something Lockdown had said that refused to make sense—or made too much sense. In the meantime, they needed more. She put out a servo.

"Did you find anything?"

He shook his head, bracing himself against the chair.

"Torn-up clearing. What looked like gashes. Two of his… blade-things."

The mention of the shuriken wounded him; reminded him, even as he held one so tightly in his servo, that there were _remnants_ of his small, quiet other half, spare and clattering and insubstantial. He flexed his fist and the blades sliced into his dermaplating, pale energon gathering where gold met grey. The gigantic mech nearly doubled up over his seat, mangled vocals crushed to a near whisper.

"Found somethin' I thought was tire-tracks, but they could've just-well been ours. Too ripped-up to scan for ID."

It was torturous, never even knowing where to start. Where they would have had something to dig their servos into if it had happened in a dirty metropolitan environment, rife with explanation and resources, the fact that someone could have simply vanished on such a benign, utterly deserted planet brought them both to processor-lock; it was staggering (and stabbing) how _impossible_ it was, much less when considering the beautiful, brutal and talented mech that had vanished.

"In-out. Possible tracks. Empty planet," Torque ground out after a moment, fighting to organize her frantic thoughts with Lockdown's red optics pinned on her. "The shuriken mean that Prowl was attacked. And if he's not _here_, he fought back and lost."

"Then who did it?" the mech demanded. "And where the Pit is he now?"

"Could he have pursued them?"

"His comm-line was dead. No reception. And he wouldn't just--he would've said somethin'."

Turning away from the screen, Lockdown struck out and hissed something about _the kid calling out for him_, but Torque couldn't listen. Comm-lines didn't black out unless a 'bot was in hard stasis: stasis either forced by a destructive power-surge or so prolonged that his or her systems switch to preserving energon by eliminating all periphery and communication functions. The latter would take over a stellar-cycle.

If Prowl had fought, lost, and disappeared clean down to his wireless signal, the evidence left them with one option.

"He's been taken."

"No," the bounty hunter snarled, the word nearly one in the same with a guttural sound of pain as he ripped the shuriken free from his lacerated servo with his hook and flung it into the ship's shadows, leaving a speckled trail of fluid. He faced her, optics blazing mad crimson.

"Lockdown, it's the only thing that makes sense—especially since everything surrounding it simply _doesn't_."

"Then—who the Pit did it?" he growled. "And _how_? M'tellin' you, that surface scan was blank! Inorganic and organic alike, nothin' over three kilos, and I been monitoring the air-space. No one's come or left!"

Predator-barren planet. Backwoods sector. No formidable organic registry; no _enemy_. Quick and silent like ghosts, a beautiful mech missing in their wake.

The conditions fused; a surge of dread punched through Torque, so utterly complete that she went numb. She had to press a servo above her quivering Spark before speaking, scrabbling through her banks for words and nothing else. She couldn't think about precious Prowl--or else she might not be able to speak of it.

"Lockdown, please don't think me glitched," she whispered after a long moment, looking up at her dearest friend. The old femme aspirated, short and scared. "I don't know how they did it, but this sounds too strange to be anything but the Quintessons."

The name didn't register with Lockdown. It refused to _mesh_ with his panic-seared processor and the rattling fear he kept trying to beat down, every part of him screaming he should still be on that planet, slashing through more silent trees. No, they were nothing but an ugly race with an echo, alien and far-away.

They meant nothing to Prowl, blurry and so out of reach. Gouged out of his life, after fusing so close.

"Thought… those squids were outta the picture," was all he could say, and was locked back into his short, infuriated paces within kliks, old ship groaning with emptiness.

"Only you could speak so flippantly of your creator-race," she muttered and he looked over at her flinty voice. There was none of the nebulous, half-cynical wonder that other 'bots spoke with: of course, while none still online had encountered their race, the Quintessons were still more real to her than they would be to a new-generation mech like himself.

"Of course they're still here. Just… hiding."

Once they became sentient enough to rebel, the cruel, genius race didn't have a chance of retaking their creations. Cybertronians were too prolific: too varied, too strong, too independent. They did the impossible, blossoming into a procreating inorganic race of their own from a history of blind _built_ servitude. Now and for millenia beforehand, the Cybertronians engaged in a war of their own with no respect for their former Lords—and perhaps it stung, to be so disregarded and _forgotten_ after forging, from spare metal and willpower, their very elemental beginnings. Perhaps the Quintessons never did forgive their creations… and now settled for whatever cruel compensation they could find.

Torque pressed her face into her servos. Lockdown's engine snarled, rebelling at her sudden trembling silence.

"You're supposed t'be helpin' me think and _find him_, not givin' me a damned history lesson! What the Pit do they—"

"Please. Please listen to me, Lockdown. You're young enough not to know, but the Quintessons haven't… given up. They linger on the periphery, bitter as sin. Waiting, perhaps not, but ones that _adapted_ to the new order, they… they live to make us back into what we were."

She bowed her head, Spark giving a nauseating pulse that choked her vocalizer. Small, brilliant Prowl became another ache to keep.

"What? Into _what_?" Lockdown roared, insides knotting, cold and panicked, at the sight of hope and effort bleeding from the femme, deadening her optics into lemon-yellow chips. She shuttered them.

"Slaves."

His aching body, straining to _make up_ for the chill in the other and nearly pressing him into mechanical arrest, froze. He stared up at Torque, Spark skipping a pulse. Two. Three.

Flat-line.

"You sayin'…"

His vocals came out as a bare whisper, thick with a complex, lethal pain not yet dawned.

He would feel it in its entirety when he was forced to leave the planet and the last place he saw Prowl and pass by his empty room and its toy tree and collect the energon-speckled shuriken from the floor with a shaking servo. He would feel it when he realized…

"Lockdown," Torque nearly gasped, seeing him _stop_. "I'm… s-so sorry, but—they're terrifyingly skilled and twice as well-connected. Mechs and femmes have been disappearing since the beginning of the Great War and no one has successfully proved that this circuit exists, much less been able to track it."

Lockdown's old Spark retreated into a cold, terrified knot of light as he stood before the screen, red optics wide and blank.

"He's gone, love."


	35. Exceptional

A/N: And here comes the long haul. Quintessons aren't canon in TFA (yet?) but I'm lightly sticking by G1 standards.

This may seem like any other slavery-capture badfic, and it is, but I still adore the mentality and reasoning behind the Quintesson's 'hobby'. The circumstances of Prowl's capture will make sense later--and who is this mysterious mech in their proverbial phonebook? Hmm.

Thank you so much for your continued interest and reviews! They are liquid crack to me and I promise it'll be more than worth it :3

* * *

Exceptional

* * *

"This is… unexpected."

'Unexpected' was the mildest of words that could be used to describe the sleek model crumpled in front of him, but Boss always had a fondness for understatements. Or, he didn't see fit to grace his underlings with his true opinions. Fender considered the beast's concise nature a blessing, what with how his grinding, hissing vocals—voice—could probably strip paint off of anything that stood still long enough. He held up his servos.

"Don't look at us—we were just as fritzed-out to find them there, too. I mean, who comes around this sector, anyways?"

Boss took a moment to look the small mech over, blank visor and all. He glared up at the two mechs standing in front of him, facial 'plating' creaking with the squeeze.

"And how did you locate…_them_?"

"We got some atmospheric interference, but figured it for a cloud or something. It was their ship. Otherwise, we, uh… just followed the unholy racket."

They traded looks, grinning so widely that Boss glared at them again, prompting an explanation—not just cloudy personal jokes. Tower shrugged.

"They were 'facing to rival organics in heat. You should'a heard this one scream."

Boss stiffened in disgust, instantly regretting his flat curiosity. Though he eked out an existence in the middle of their misbegotten 'functions', unable to help but internalize every last error in the sordid decline of a perfect creation as he studied his enemy, the _idea of it_ still made his insides roil. _'Facing'._ Within a mere seventy millennia, the miserable toys had found a way to warp the boundaries of their tight, beautifully one-track programming beyond recognition and the _decadence_—the unforgivable perversion--

"And? Did you get the other?" he demanded, no longer interested in their tainted captive and his behavioral mutations.

"He looked too nasty for us to even try. If he'd caught us picking off this one, I don't think we'd have made it back," Fender admitted uncomfortably. "Besides, most he'd be good for is... I'unno, gladiator rings. Oil-sport."

"Spare parts are always in demand; often a dealmaker. Why didn't you cuff them both in… _overload_?" Boss hissed, eye-slots flaring a faintly aggravated orange—pissed, no doubt, at a loss of merchandise and the other's unwanted opinions. The shorter mech shrugged.

"Y'never know how long that's gonna last," Tower grunted, earning himself a warning hiss. "B'lieve us, Boss, if you'd seen this monstrosity---besides, we needed the bike's EMP generator to take him down. Even then, he gave us a run.

"Idiots. You shouldn't have risked it. You could have been followed."

As brittle as his tone was, Fender was quick to notice how their ringleader had shifted his attention back to their catch as they mentioned what level of Pit they'd braved to secure the lithe demon, even if the mech couldn't repress a habitual shudder as their crashed prize was _touched_ and _inspected_ at length, every stage punctuated by a too-audible slither of flesh against lacquered metal. He refreshed his vocals, talking through the tangible haze of Boss's renewed interest—knowing, as he did, that they hadn't had new, much less _fresh-minted_ stock in quite a long while.

"Pit, no. We were jus' that quick. In fact, I think that beastie is still crashing around in the brush, looking for his friend. We're in the clear."

"He is exceptional," Boss intoned after a long moment, a reluctant rolling push of his _appendages_ sending the mech clanking onto his back to bare more gold-rimmed black. Something deep within him fizzled piteously, dribbling into soft white noise. "For a machine."

Understatements again. Compared to the rusted boltbags they had in back, the bike was damn near miraculous. Gift-wrapped, to boot.

"That's not all. Take a freeze-frame of those mods he's got. Take a monkey wrench to him and we could hock those for half his price."

Boss' alien features underwent some strange liquid stretching-pinching change when the glossy upgrades were pointed out to him, bulking out the bike's figure into a pretty vicious picture. Then he seemed to glower (even after all this time, they never were quite sure how to read him—nor did they bother) and rumble disapprovingly.

"Acceptable. Call the conniving little inorganic up," he growled finally, gliding out of the poorly-constructed 'office' located in the back of their stock warehouse and leaving his two workers to their charge. "I desire his quotes on what we can get from these... modifications and the model compatibility range. As filthy as he is, the machine does not lie. Your 'happy coincidence' may yet prove its worth."

Neither mech expected praise, but with something so pretty and _lucrative_ in their grasp, ready to be strung up and hooked in and 'prepped', they neither desired nor needed it. They each took an end, Fender grinning blankly into the blacked-out visor on the new arrival's long face; neither noticed the determined hum building in the prone mech until it was too late.

No one ever knew how long EMP-induced stasislock would last, either—nor what would happen when a lethally trained bounty hunter ripped out of it with a scream, two hissing blue-lit katana and a body pounding with pure terror.


	36. Captive

A/N: Hi there! Sorry about the skipped update last week, kids. I was super-ill and had a Very Serious Chemistry Test D: Buh.

Back on track! …And mourning every _sentence of this_.

PS: Bitch move, Swindle. Bitch move.

* * *

Captive

* * *

It had been going on for cycles: a static-thick groan or a soft howl, grinding at their audio receptors. Grinding, piercing, penetrating. It echoed in the brown low-lit chamber, seeming to scour the length of the room then turn to cover the raw soundwaves again to rival a maddening fit of pacing. Finally, one of the mechs struck his chips against the table and called over his shoulder:

"_Slag_, idiot, f'you're gonna do that, short his vocalizer. Can't register myself processing."

It was useless to yell at the grunts: the mildly hive-minded creatures had no auditory units, only internal receivers for telepathic messages, but the vibration of a good haranguing sometimes startled the organic slaves out of whatever error were committing. Then again, with such limited activity on such a dirt smear planet, it was always a little satisfyingly enraging to yell, fail to get a response, then give the little suckers what they deserved.

When nothing happened and the tortured sound dragged on and on and on, long past its 'recognizable sentient fear' grace period and now nothing but a horrifically obnoxious, circuit-searing _noise_, Fender got up from the bare table with a metal-metal screech and strode over to where the stubby, fleshy creature hung on their newest arrival, breathing in deep, lusty toad breaths that bloated its ridged back in time. He smacked the Gordone away from the mech, knocking him twice to break the Spark-thrall and get his damned spindly digits out from the bot's wiring. Unseated, it hit the floor with a squawk and a thud, rooting around in the dust for a klik; brimming with aggravation, Fender dug into the mech's mutilated open neck until he found the ribbed wire that led to the vocals and shorted it with a callous burst of electricity from the handy node in his servo.

Once the moan dribbled down to a creak then halted entirely, he glared the creature away until it waddled behind one of the many rust-spotted racks with an evil throaty sound. The row of back-to-back, 60-degree angle restraint-tables created a little triangle of space that the creatures called their own. It was convenient enough—saved them from having to create a habitat for the smears. The smell was horrendous and in squirming out they tended to track their own brown-grey organic filth everywhere, but that's what olfactory blockers were for. Fender grimaced down to his girders and flicked a bit of waste off of the mech's chassis, then, in an almost bored fashion, proceeded to do a check-up.

As he expected, it was their new arrival—emphasis on _new_. The vicious gold-trimmed bike. Looked a lot smaller without his mods. Fender rattled the mech's glossy chassis paneling.

A bit of poking around near the black mech's indecently bared Spark revealed broken pins, all twisted at anguished angles. It was casual wear and tear: even if the 'bots couldn't rope their tensors or gears into anything if their function depended on it, chamber-plating was the most reinforced stuff Cybertonians claimed. Only natural. The Gordone sported a considerable strength and resiliency for their small size, however, and within a megacycle or two could get their calcified, quadruple-jointed digits into whatever part of a bot they desired—which was always the Spark.

They were slaves themselves, sad, squat and homeless. The Gordone, a paltry ninth-level organic race, ate a certain kind of energy: in the past they laid out on their crystal-laden planet and absorbed the light, but their nearby sun-star had gone out long ago, leaving them to starve in darkness. Boss had managed to salvage a few of them back before the Great War and inbred them to death in the dark of his ship; they now performed maintenance tasks that required little thought, like energon-dilution and tube-changing. They weren't paid a thing because, while they absorbed enough light to survive on the warehouse planet's surface and the foliage settled well in their strange systems, their bonus was simply to be let near their carefully maintained merchandise. Sparks were the equivalent of rapture to them, a bite-sized sun of the purest energy to be found in the universe. Left alone with the captive Cybertronians for megacycles on end, the greedy grunts were free to pry open any mech or femme's Sparkchambers and jam their dirty little servos—hands—right into the bot's vulnerable Spark and _mess_.

And, of course, feast.

So long as the Gordones painful attentions didn't offline the 'bot, and they never had, there was no problem. Boss even seemed to… encourage it. He got that _face_ when his merchandise screamed at having the pulsing fabric of their center invaded by hard cold talons and a gaping mouth, radiating a locked-up, convulsive pain only enhanced by the soundless drape of the chains. As long as they were able to scream, that is. Fender and the other mechs (and that weird new shell-shocked femme) didn't take kindly to the sound and usually disconnected or shorted any vocals before they went mad. Their 'charges' could scream all they wanted, so long as it was never actually translated into shrieking, piercing soundwaves. It made no difference to the Gordone.

Fender got a little disgusted at it, even now. Even after a solid three centuries of working the circuit, the way the squat, hunch-back organics followed his movement with their engorged orange-filmed eyes; the way they waited at the pedes of a new bot, nearly paralyzed with slippery excitement at the feel of a fresh Spark burning nearby… it still disturbed him. There was always the thought of what they'd do to any of the workers if they happened to get themselves stasis-locked. Fresh meat. The tall mech's engine growled as he picked through the future-slave's chamber, ignoring the looming, silent pressure of the spurned Gordone's eyes from the dark of its filth-caked home-crevice.

The minor chassis pins were snapped and one of the key gears of his chamber was stripped, but it wouldn't offline him. His azure Spark, on the other hand, had been badgered into a desperately dense, wounded little ball, barely daring to pulse. Bad shape; delicately terminal. Painful as Pit, if the bleed-out _feel_ of it was any judge. Fender reached in his pack and grabbed some putty, forcing the little bike's chassis paneling back together with an unhealthy creak and pasting the substance down the seam. It fused to the metal and hardened within cycles, leaving a clear line and a forty-megacycle job for the Gordone. His optics lingered on the ugly trail of solder looping the mech's chassis—the one injury he'd come in with.

"That should keep the little shaft-suckers away from him for a solar-cycle or two."

A few cycles later he was back at the table, picking his chips up. They gambled to pass the time. Fender couldn't keep his mind on the game—or the cautious pacing of the grunts behind him.

"Did you see him shaking earlier?" he asked after a while, ruffling his markers. "He's damn willful if he can even manage to rope his tensors into it."

"Yeah. Willful." They'd already seen willful from him. Capturing him had been enough of a haul. Tower nearly lost his arm. The other mech shrugged and squinted at his own markers. "Thought it was a she? Little top-heavy for a mech."

"What does it matter, so long as it's strapped up?"

"True slaggin' that."

They traded chips and thought more in the dull silence. Fender had seen willful. Or, at least seen the results of it.

It happened when they were getting the new mech situated. They had him strapped up by the arms and were working on chaining down his pedes when Boss scraped in with a cloud of red-tinted, furious expectation boiling around him, eyes locked greedily on the process. Unused to such personal attention or the rattling breath of their superior, they pressed on.

Quick and dirty, they popped his hood. The Pack was already installed—they weren't having any more 'surprise reboots'. Drawing oil-smeared wires from hanging hooks to the right and left, they hooked the bike in, maneuvering their way around the odd alien _things_ in his chassis chamber and, finally, locating his memory core under all the foreign tech. One mech plugged into the glowing column, entered an override and coaxed a section of it outwards with a thick click; the other took a small black square and carefully ran it over the exposed surface, watching the luminescence dribble from each section touched. Soon the entire slide was a dead white. Clean.

Once he was properly wiped (the superficial scan came back as a meek, flat beep) and the dangerous black object was stowed away, Boss made a deep, gaseous growl and slithered closer, as though trying to sense—or force—something from the exposed, silent mech by mere raging proximity. Finally, he turned to Fender.

"Consider this one your personal whipping post."

Tower shot him a look from the other side of the table, cracked red optics wide. Then Boss held up a tentacle: the thick flesh-column was cleanly sliced off a third of the way, puckered suckers throbbing minutely. Already a too-glossy nub had begun to press its way out of the reddish muscle-thick mound (the mechs nearly ejected to see such organic gore) but Boss' face was stuck on _fury_ and that meant he was entirely serious. When he rebooted right after being taken in, the pretty thing had apparently managed to get a slice or two in (and knock Fender out—thus, his ignorance) before they properly sedated him and took away his blades and the rest of his mods. Having an EMP generator was something of a god-tool among Cybertronians: no matter how skilled a mech (and they knew this one was skilled) one hard pulse and it was over for them.

But he'd gotten his shot in and that was all that mattered. Boss was pissed. Personally pissed—which meant this one might not make it to being sold.

They nodded. The Quintesson's deep-set _fury_ eyes pulsed like flaking embers, continuing to watch with vengeful vigilance as they strung the shining new model up and shoved the oil-speckled feeding tube into his mouth and down his fuel intake valve, chains rattling as he actually _twitched_.

"I want it to suffer," Boss hissed, then turned and disappeared behind a rack of ever-choking, sightless femmes.

It.

It wasn't as though the workers were blind to what they were doing: the basic betrayal of their race. Or rather, it would have been a betrayal if they had any semblance of metal-metal loyalty. It was ironic, to see bots so malicious and selfish and _flawed_ working for one of the only remaining creatures who had begun to hate their kind ever since they developed, in Spark-warmed software mutations and unexplained twistings of cold coding, _emotions_. It proved for them, in some small way, that these creatures deserved to suffer for deviating from the inflexible servile perfection the Quintessons had originally created. Their projects had gone so… astray.

The universe had seen them too long as _autonomous_ organisms. It was time to restart the trend, as it were, of seeing the malfunctions as commodity items. Slaves, bought and paid for. The Quintessons tried to… improve their merchandise and reverse-engineer their corruption where possible. It was impossible, however, to recreate the catatonic slaves they so desired: several hundred brutally botched surgeries and invasive hacks had sent mechs and femmes spiraling into screaming dementia and, beyond unsalvageable, those damned Sparks had always fizzled out in the process. They would never be unfeeling, but where efficiency failed, the remaining Quintessons, roving and vengeful and _meticulous_, learned to take great pleasure in making them feel altogether too much. They dedicated their eons-old lives to abusing and crushing those ill-gained emotions and sensations and all the abstract flowing things that had no home in cold metal.

_Machines. Cogs and directives and fancy programming; tools of another race. So they were begun, so they will be ended—never truly autonomous, even in their extinction. After surpassing their directives, they will regret their ability to grow. To feel. Under us, they will beg to be reduced to obedient appliances. Anesthetized tools._

_But we will not give them the honor of begging, the honor of voicing agony. The pain, superfluous and unintended, is only validation of the single resounding fact that they _should not be_. Flood them with it. Tell them, in this subjective sensory language they should be so cursed to understand, that they are abominations._

_Make them suffer._

Perhaps that was why, from the instant they were captured, their creations were aware of every passing moment.

It would cost too much to put each Cybertronian into artificially-induced stasis, especially when considering the lengthy turn-over rate and transport time for intergalactic customers. Instead, a powerful 'hack-pack' was shoved into their sparking guts and wired into their mainframe, blocking any and all voluntary physical-mechanical output. Input—in the form of sensation, sounds and other stimuli—flooded their information highways just as cleanly as ever. It was technically a brand of energy-efficient stasis, since all voluntary physical mechanisms were nullified, but inside the paralyzed mech or femme the processor still whirred and the technomechanical innards still pumped and, most of all, the tender Spark still quailed.

They were still conscious, still feeling, but unable to react or fight. Unable to respond. Trapped. The most they could do was scream, but even that ended quickly. The workers sat by, counting their credits and deluding themselves that the silence was really silent; taking their pleasure and amusement from their brothers and sisters where they could. So it had been for millenia, so it would be for millenia more.

Once the sluggish card game was over and the green mech drifted off to attend to a commcall from Boss, Fender looked carefully over at the little black mech, stretched to all four corners of the restraint table by cuffs and scum-caked chains, long face upturned and visor blank. Then he got up. A Gordone skittered from under the bike's table; he kicked it before it could get too far, then bent and went to the bottom cuffs. The mech freed the bike's wickedly-shaped pedes and hiked the slender legs around his waist with a metallic squeal.

"Whaddya doin'?"

The other mech turned to look as Fender spared a thick servo to fiddle in the exposed circuitry of the bike's neck, carelessly gouging wires out of their casings to get to the one he needed… because ever since he'd seen the little black bike straddling that pile of junk, bursting with light, he'd wanted a piece. Boss, after all, said to take everything out on him. Direct order, even.

He was still pretty, even with that pink-caked tube snaking out of his slack open mouth-- and it'd been a long time since anything like that bothered him.

"Refreshing his vocals," he muttered, smirking slowly when the current caught and something wound up inside him with a stunned, almost apprehensive inhalation of electricity. The chains rattled. "I wanna hear this one."

* * *

It was hard, for Swindle, giving anyone benefit of the doubt.

It was a _gift_, after all, that didn't promise a proper return, but he tried his best where old business associates were concerned. Lockdown had never been anything but easy and deliciously predictable in his greed and relative ignorance. But this? The entire situation was bizarre, almost as though something were personally _amiss_ with his business contact. He pressed on, but—no, after fifteen cycles working himself silly with all the bravado and amiable yammer he could muster, it _wasn't his imagination_.

It couldn't have been, not when Lockdown physically turned away from the commscreen for the fifth time and scraped his hook over that ugly-looking bare strip on his dark thigh, rumbling vaguely in answer to a crisp proposal and staring into the shadowy ship. There was no _energy_, no _response_; solar-cycle in, solar-cycle out, Swindle could at least count on juggernaut Lockdown to put a slamming halt to his energy and let him know, bare-faced and flat, that _it wasn't going to happen_. It was obvious that the arms-dealer wasn't going to get what he wanted this time, yes, but neither did Lockdown send his sunny proposals careening back into his facial plating with a snap and a comeback. Every well-loosed verbal arrow seemed to whiz around the hulking mech, warded off by the unfocused roam of Lockdown's narrowed optics as he paced in front of the screen, stride low and agitated.

Finally, left with brutally limited time before his next scheduled engagement and no other option but to loosen the other's vocalizer in whatever way he could, Swindle finally took the sticky plunge. He… _inquired_.

"What's _wrong_, LD? You look like you've slipped a rod!" He hid the brisk quadruple-tap of his impatient digits under his commcamera. "You're gonna wear a _hole_ in little Moof's floor if you keep that up!"

Much like his plastic-glossed grin, the blocky mech's calculated chuckle didn't even make a dent on the stiff silence of the ship. Lockdown stopped as though reined in, straightening his thoughts out with a hair-pin screech-screech-screech on his plating, hook jerking back and forth over the raw metal. Finally, he refreshed his optics and grunted over his spiked shoulder:

"Kid's gone."

"Oh _no_! Bad luck, guy!" Swindle fake-exclaimed then lowered his voice to a husky near-conspiratorial whisper, cupping it behind his purple servo. "How much did he take off with?"

Lockdown stiffened and hissed, digging his choice weapon into his own plating so fiercely it almost made the smile drop from the other mech's face at the resulting screech. The tall mech inhaled, fans chugging unsteadily, then moved over to his navigator's chair.

"Didn't take off with anything. S'just… gone." When Swindle peered at him expectantly, the bounty hunter bowed his head and grumbled into his servo, "Swear, he was stolen."

"To be _stolen_, someone has to do the taking," Swindle reminded him helpfully, waggling a digit. "Who in the universe would want to snitch your sidekick?"

Lockdown's engine growled warily and—Swindle couldn't believe he was _saying_ this—a little bit _weakly_.

"Quints," he rasped.

"C'mon now, big guy. That's a little _excessive_," the arms-dealer chortled thickly, _so_ thickly—he'd never, after all, taken Lockdown for a conspiracy theorist! But Lockdown didn't react, red optics guttering maroon. He just shook his head and thumbed his hook, grinding out:

"No other reason."

"You sure he didn't just _leave_?" He shrugged when Lockdown glared at him, continuing, "'Cos let's face it, Lockdown, you are _definitely_ not what he's used to! He just hung around for a century or two: that's barely a trial run, guy. In fact, I bet he couldn't wait to run back to his little Autobot _buddies_! You know that kind, the propaganda programming never quite--"

"They're all scrap. Dust back on that…planet. And he wouldn't do that," Lockdown insisted, grappling with something just out of reach of his processor then turning viciously, one digit between his worn dentals. Remembering, too painfully well, the curl of the kid's body against his and the way he let his wrist be bitten with that _smile_. The feel of him. The wild white-blue shudder of his…

Lockdown clenched his fist, shaking his beastly head. His Spark flickered.

"Wouldn't just… take off."

"Yeah, 'cos you know people!" Swindle scoffed slickly, popping his joints with a flourish. "Well, all's well that ends well, right?"

Lockdown's optics narrowed to evil slits. Swindle chuckled, rolling his thick shoulders.

"Okay, maybe not! Let's go with 'these things happen for a reason'—just take it as it is, pal. He's gone, you're not. Now, how about we talk business?"

Lockdown didn't respond, visual field fazing out again. Then he clanged into his chair and mumbled something—probably about having to go—and the arms-dealer vented a gust of air and _deflated_ a notch, rubbing at his optic shutters. This was going nowhere.

"Alright. You want me to keep an optic out for him?"

The bounty hunter remained slumped in his chair, looking up at him with tattoos twisted with mistrust. It sounded uncommonly generous for an exacting mech such as Swindle—and he knew Swindle.

"Just in my quadrant," Swindle said, raising his servos as though assuring him it was no deviation of character. He made a clicking noise, then, 'firing' one like a gun. "Anything more and it'll cost you."

Lockdown nodded slowly, glowering at him thoughtlessly.

"If you find him, I'll give you somethin'."

Swindle's huge optics widened further with a blank electronic chirp. The offer was not insultingly vague as it seemed: it was altogether startling. The purple and tan mech's flat face twisted at the idea of a blank check from his so-very-exact friend, but he covered it up in time to rush the goodbyes (not that now-catatonic juggernaut took any notice, lost as he was in his own foggy old processor with the hook already at his leg again) and sign off. He sat for a few cycles after, digits plucking at the arms of his chair, optics narrowed.

And here he thought, so foolishly, that nothing could really mess old Lockdown up. Fragging Autobot. A _blank check_. He shook his head, engine puttering in deep dissatisfaction.

The unusually dour sound wasn't long in lasting. As always, the poisonously optimistic arms-dealer _cleared_ and he turned to fiddling with things by his control station, thoughts gaining lacquered momentum. Within cycles, he was smiling again, content and heavy.

Because, after all, these things did happen for a reason.

Swindle was a multi-facetted 'bot. He dealt with a wide variety of clientele, all operating from different levels of illegality: he wanted maximum market coverage and there were certain things an Elite Guard turncoat could get him that an underground trafficker, no matter how well connected, couldn't. He played the field. All of it.

Sometimes the field played him, of course, but even that led to greater things. Through one of those long-ago slip-ups, he had gained contact with an… _organization_. It wasn't a business _entanglement_, but rather a business fling: frisky and flighty, they only showed up every so often, usually right when he'd forgotten about them--but always with a trade so lucrative Swindle was shocked he could ever _begin_ to forget. He could infer what they _did_, of course, what with the spare chains and their strange merchandise, but how many plasma canons and bolt guns had he accrued from these mystery gifters? How quickly could he be coaxed to forget what he was never told in the first place?

Very quickly.

The only thing they (a scuffed and scattered clutch of mechs, changing little over the stellar-cycles and very little interested in _chat_) required from him were his business-savvy opinions. He gave his quotes for any variety of strange and exquisite mods they shoved under his olfactory receptors from Primus-knew-where, and the next 'casually' acquired weapon they usually sent his way. It was a bit pot-luck, true, but he _did_ require the odd favor once in a while and it required very little effort on his part. Sometimes he even got an underhanded informational bonus.

A month and a half ago, for instance, he'd received a very_ interesting_, very_ pleasing_ transmission.

His mystery contacts had dispensed with idle chatter immediately, promptly showcasing a collection of modifications for his subjective pricing. They were of quality, certainly, and possessing of a distinctly exotic flair, but that wasn't what caused him to stall and stare and stall further—it was because they were _so very particular_. One of a kind, even.

When they asked him (repeating stiffly, optics thinned) how much, he refreshed his vocals and scanned the glossy gold and black modifications with a keen glowing optic, one servo to his chin. Elegant golden horns sliced out of the pile, nearly obscured by the handsomely blocky shoulder-guards and the jump-jet boosters. All perfectly preserved. Perfectly… extracted.

"Thirty-thousand for the whole set."

The mech on the other end grunted and began to shut down the feed and Swindle waited just long enough before he pushed a servo forward, catching the other mech's optic.

"May I, heh, ask where you acquired…?"

"Classified," he answered, looking dully surprised that the question-dry, smiling arms-dealer had finally _asked_.

"I was just going to mention, guy…" Swindle began, chuckling slightly, "If you took those off a 'bot and he's still around, you'd better keep an optic on him. Extra security, if you know what I mean: armor like that isn't awarded to just anyone. Just a… y'know."

Wink.

"Friendly bit of advice. Free of charge."

And so he had done his good deed, turning what humble resources he had toward ensuring that those one-of-a-kind mods would fetch a reasonable price and _adorable_ little "Prowl" would not find his way back to the bounty hunter's side in a million stellar-cycles. It was a sorely needed kindness, judging by the pile of wreckage he'd found in place of Lockdown but a megacycle ago. He still couldn't _process_ it! If the Autobot had managed to butcher him so completely in under two centuries, think of the damage he could have caused after three? Four?

It was best, for the _both_ of them, that he be taken out of the picture now in a curt twitch of fate's blade before Lockdown could lose his slicing business momentum completely and simply _devolve_. It wasn't as though he didn't have faith in the bounty hunter's withholding and unsociable nature, but if the sad, unnatural state of affairs had gone on any longer… Lockdown may have done something stupid. Something unthinkable; something stupid and ridiculous and impossible and, of all horrors, _Spark-related_.

But now?

The plate was clear. Prowl, long a too-personal detriment to the arms-dealer, was gone. Lockdown was trying to find him but, impatient as the snarling antique was, _that_ wouldn't last long. He was growling now, but give it a stellar-cycle or five… he wound wind down. His natural, oily greed would boil up, feeding his lust for physical accomplishment and the scraps of others. The bounty hunter just wasn't crafted for _dwelling_, wasn't programmed for _melancholy_. He would tear forward and pick up a bite-sized PM on the way and things would return to normal—all with his cursed little Autobot rusting safely in a warehouse cellar somewhere.

Even if he didn't know the details, Lockdown would warm up to the idea in time. Swindle was sure of it. All it required was a little… smiling on his part, and he was in such a good mood today.


	37. Purchase

A/N: It's Friday again! …Yeah, I couldn't keep the torture-angst (in detail) up for long. Some of you guessed this chapter, you clever girls. Congrats and I hope you aren't disappointed!

UND ZE PLOT SCIKKENS--!

* * *

Purchase

* * *

"Holy--"

"Dial it down, idiot."

"But… scan that. _Scan it_. What a downgrade," Stackup whistled, slapping at the mech beside him. "Suicidal malfunction."

"Barely protoformed, too," the other agreed. His blue optics whirred, sizing up their quarry up from a comfortable distance. "But moneyed. Take a look at that polish."

"Didn't have to wear it on his fraggin' chassis."

"Saves us having to ask."

Because Primus save the glitch if he wasn't _asking for it_ all on his little lonesome.

Even when the underbuilt mech strode right up to their 'operation'—the cargo ship was cloaked under a shell that resembled the compact-soil buildings that populated the desert planet, the two on-duty mechs sitting out front with jugs of dirty coolant to protect themselves from the white heat—and started an all-too-pointed conversation with them, they didn't know whether they were going to let him in or not. Popping out against the red sand like a glossy marble toy, he was the only technomechanical being for continents, perhaps planets. The local level-six populace consisted of low-slung, heavily armored arachnid creatures and he was not one.

No, he was small and white. Haughty. And he knew the keyword.

There were so, so many reasons to justify refusing him at the door—his excruciatingly suspicious presence in the primitive desert gutter of a miserable C-level planet at the edges of a declining galaxy, the symbol on his chassis—but the keyword and the clean, collected but thoroughly _undersized_ look of him won out. As tight as his tensors were strung, as exacting the beam of his stormy optics, there was something about the new customer they couldn't take seriously…which would have been the perfect undercover strategy for busting them all to Pit and Boss never would have let the little glitch in.

They weren't Boss. They just had to answer to his sadistic temper if they didn't move at least one 'bot on this stop, which was reason enough to stretch their 'trust' a bit. It had been nearly five months en route and they'd barely rid themselves of three older models after hacking their prices to pieces: they were in sore need of a pay-off, especially with Boss jacking up that bike's tag every time a customer tried to take a look at him. Scaring them off.

Still wasn't finished with him, apparently. Judging from the _noise_ that happened off-shift, he was just getting started. Explained the new scratch marks, not to mention the cracked visor.

So they let the mech in, still biting hard onto their doubts. The two settled for looming physical intimidation once their customer was inside the stale-aired ship: the small mech nearly whirled in a barely-repressed panic at a threatening scrape behind him. Fender just finished closing the airlock and pushed him forward into the dark, closing in. No, once out of the sunlight he was no threat—if a little fun to push. Plus, as far as they could tell (and they could, after scanning him for bugs and manually disabling his commsytem) he was alone. Utterly and ridiculously alone.

No one came there alone. No one save trusted family heads and business contacts. Stacks was right: their 'invader' was an idiot, but he didn't know that they knew. And that didn't change the fact that he had credits out the tailpipe and maybe a kink or three to work out.

Beyond that, it wasn't altogether unheard of. Some of them were freaks.

Eons of business had taught the workers that just because a mech or femme was awarded that dashing red insignia? Didn't mean a damn thing. A few of them had even been indispensable; valued customers and alibis, somehow stowing their _merchandise_ (and sordid activities) away from the optics of the public. Never before, however, had Boss' gamut simply been approached or blatantly infiltrated on a neutral planet: there was always a tense dance beforehand, a distant swapping and manipulation of contacts that rivaled a marriage arrangement between two warring parties in its complexity. They couldn't afford to be anything but vigilant regarding their pristine reputations and usually never even stepped _pede_ in Boss' base of operations.

This? Different. The slender thing held up under their workover, arms crossed and optics half-shuttered arrogantly, but they smirked to hear the _sound_ he made when he actually stepped inside the main chamber of the ship and the smell hit him.

"Lookin' for anythin' in particular, _sir_?" Stacks rasped, throwing Fender a look as the little white mech picked his way around a smear of grey Gordone dung (little servo over his olfactory receptors as he hurriedly offlined them with a stifled blip) then turned to the dark rows of mechs and femmes hooked up all down the ship's yawning length. He paused, big optics focusing and brightening to a clean blue to chase off the guttering yellow lighting, then flicked his servo.

"Show me all of it."

They intended to.

* * *

It was random; destructively haphazard, only feeding the fear left by the gaping statistics. What else could she do?

It had been months. Months and months, bare of leads or news. Still, for him, she reached out.

"I'm—excuse me. Have you seen this mech?"

The stopped femme, surely on a business trip on the mining planet, regarded her strangely for a cycle then peered at the visual of a small bike model spinning on the other's datapad screen. It was a mech, heavy with well-crafted modifications. After a too-short moment, the blue femme shook her head and moved away, but Torque grabbed her arm and drew the others' suspicious optics up from her blank chassis by swapping the images—by now accessed two hundred times on twenty planets. Blank stares gained for every one, casting around in a boundless, black, dense universe for a single flickering Spark. A lost star.

Impossible.

"Please. This is his alt-mode. Without his mods—you're sure?"

Her own battered Spark always quivered when they walked off and _out_, leaving her once more with no ground to stand on. Torque hooked her datapad onto her hip, staring at the colorless plateau and black refineries before her. Then the old femme shook her head and, slow with sorrow, moved on to the next.

* * *

It had been a row and a half. The little mech was beginning to walk a little fast, out of more than a disinterest in the vacant-optic'ed models strung up to his left, the tubing snaking out of their mouths still stained with the last pulse of muddy energon. The two watched him avidly, plainly baffled and more than a little malicious—if he turned out to be too suspicious, they could just offline their little lone ranger and be done with it or… new stock was always appreciated. To slow him down, Fender stopped and pointed out a particular favorite of his, detailing her alt-mode and so forth. The young mech nodded curtly, optics already scanning the next row with a nervous, muted hum.

"Ain't often we get 'bots like you here," Fender said after a cycle or two of resumed meandering through the Spark-deadening buzz of so many stasis-locked 'bots. The white mech stiffened, taking an effort to _inspect_ a willowy bit of merchandise with orange plating and filth-caked digits that closed—clawed--on empty air. Her chassis barely had any paint left, scored by claw marks.

"The Guard are not without their unwanted tasks."

"Didn't say nothin' 'bout Guards, _sir_," he said slickly, striding on. "Rarely get our kind. S'mostly organics looking for an easy worker."

"And what is to say I am not an inorganic looking for the same?" the mech snapped, fixing the worker with a scathing look that he barely honored with a backwards glance. He stopped to let a Gordone limp out of their path with a strange, sickened expression, then clenched both fists, scowl reigniting. "Your curiosity is unbecoming. Show me the rest of your stock or I will consider this a waste of my time."

The youngling wasn't good at being sincerely snotty; he overplayed it. Stacks was pretty sure the deep vocals were an upgrade. It only added to the preposterous weirdness of it all, but not in a way that _fit_. All the same, they led him onward, commenting here and there and keeping uncomfortably close lest he _do anything_ that would prompt speedy action, especially if Boss came back from his negotiations in the nearby settlement. He would disassemble them down to the sub-atomic level if he found them leading an Elite around the ship like a tourist.

All in all, however, the mystery-mech was behaving himself--then they turned the corner and he stopped.

The gold and black bike was three tables down, still-glossy plating gleaming in the low light. Even stripped, he was a pretty picture. They'd even wiped him down before opening their doors—then again, he sorely needed it. Oil and energon, fresh from tubing and fuel lines, could be corrosive if left too long and there were not a few occasions where he was dripping with both. Thankfully, though, their 'customer' wasn't worried about slashed fuel lines and hairpin cracks. His optics were wide with something entirely different. Something… ground-shaking.

Staring blankly at the table and its limp occupant, the young mech muscled down something very strong (his engine gave a shrill, strangled rev) and took a few, extremely careful steps toward the model. He stared at the bike's rounded shoulders, the simple stunted jut of his horns and the elegant fairings, fists drifting closed at his sides.

"What is… this one's name?"

First time he'd ever heard that one. As far as Fender was concerned, they didn't have names. He moved forward and rapped on the bike's chassis, offering a positive smirk.

"That's entirely reprogrammable, sir, with the right software: you can call him anything you want."

"No. What is he called?" They looked at him blankly; the little Elite turned his rounded face up and said in a trembling tone, like he expected an _answer_, "Your name."

They stood and listened to the false silence.

Goaded by the little mech's stony stare once turned on him, Fender eventually reached up and yanked the tubing out of the bike's mouth with a coarse slurp and popped his hood and fiddled unhappily with the Pack, disabling it for a moment. The change was startling: after the electric breath returned to his limbs with a moaning noise, the little bike seized up and shuddered, digits twitching piteously above their thick cuffs. He sucked in the dirty air with a heave of his scratched chassis and emitted a feeble, dumb bit of static, obviously as befuddled as the other mech was aghast at the agonizing return of _movement_.

"Say it again," Fender ordered him, one servo clamped on the side of the table. His own blue optics were locked on the model, now attempting to raise his heavy head and look around; the young mech spared him a horrified look before turning back to the revived—_released_—mech.

"What is your n-name?"

It got through. It actually got through and they could see it working its way through his dry insides, birthing a cautious, frightened flicker of his cracked, oil-spattered visor. Rising from a suffocating stretch of pain and helplessness, half mad with the weight of his own sentience, the model's mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. Then:

"P… Prowl," he whispered, already husky vocals mangled from the ceaseless chafe of the tubing. Then Fender popped him and switched the Pack again and he sagged with a cold metal creak, visor grey once more. The other worker stepped back, slapping his servos together with a half-stunned look. It was amazing, but it made sense that he'd be able to spit his name out from such a haze. It was the only thing he had left, after all.

Stirring them both from reverie, Stacks put a heavy, heavy servo on the young mech's petite shoulder-plating.

"You interested?"

"Indeed," he whispered faintly after a long, long moment, optics locked on the limp figure, ever-more ghastly in the low lights after exhibiting a jerking, rattling split-klik life in a row of vacant stock-still shells. He refreshed his vocals nervously. He _shook_. "How lo… long has he been—"

"In the circuit? About half a stellar-cycle. This one's fresh chrome." Fender reached up and twisted three meaty digits past the bike's chassis-plating. It creaked. "Wanna see his Spark?"

"_What_?"

It slipped—or catapulted—out, straight from the Elite's own Spark and it was too late even to slap a servo over his mouth. Glaring in surprise, the two workers traded a dark, knowing look as the little mech half-turned away and forced himself to continue, "N… no. I have no wish to--no, this will be proficient. E-enough."

With such a reaction to such a rational health question, his cover--and benefit of the doubt--was blown. His former nervousness could have simply been cowardice, but _concern_? If given a chance to make conclusions and close suspicions and activate their vocals, the two mechs might have straightened up and told him to get out. Stacks might have used that mighty grip and closed down and forced him down onto the floor and that might have been the end of it. But the little 'bot cut them off them: he mastered himself and looked up with a strangely cold, blank expression and conquered their doubt with the one thing that had conquered their lives and their racial identity. Money.

"I'll take him as he is."

* * *

So they got the bike ready. No more questions, no more games.

No doubt Boss would be somewhat pissed at having his plaything stolen, but while _he_ wasn't around to scare buyers with prices, they knew the angle now. Unorthodox as it was, they knew of a _connection_, thanks to the little mech's slips and wide-optic ogles, and the resultant price they eked out of him was downright blasphemous. In the six-digit area, bigger even than Boss was threatening. Feeling cocky, they added on bogus taxes, extras, stretching the mech's gold-trimmed worth to a ridiculous length—and with an almost-horrible determination, the white mech nodded to each. He argued one perfunctorily, but accepted it in the end, unable to tear his optics off of his silent prize.

They unhooked the slim model with a speed only gifted by centuries of practice, chains rattling noisily as he was laid out on another brown-spattered table. Upon freeing him from the cuffs, they wiped the crumbling rust from his too-slender carpal seams where his very exostructure had peeled off and dissolved away in the chemical-laden air, leaving scuffed rings. It was much like wiping at a sticky open sore, driving alcohol into the glistening scabs then scraping outwards. The air squeezed and heated with the silent pulsations of the model's Spark; the pain made him vibrate with anxiety and blind fear.

The white mech's bravado, if it had ever been intact, was decimated. He was practically hooked into the other mech, trembling in time as though the anguish were a throbbing electric current, greedily conducted by the oil-thick non-air between them. Stacks gave the buyer all the information he would need. Vocal-registered him for the DC software. Opened his new pet up again, took out the hack-pack and did some more fiddling with his exposed and ugly alien insides. The little mech hardly heard half of it, stasis-walking through the motions, but when Fender uploaded the blocker via his distal auditory port, all the invisible tension bled out of the bike in a single klik, leaving him almost flat-lining in his calm. Their customer stiffened and drew back, staring down at the disturbingly limp 'bot.

"What was that?" he asked almost fearfully, unaware even of Stacks' scathing look directed at the back of his head.

"That was a blocker—a file-lock covering everything that occurred here, for your safety and ours," Fender explained. "Obviously, we can't let anything go out of here except for you and yours. He's got an inhibitor code running in him right now. When he reboots in thirty-six megacycles, he's gonna be slow on the take and the DC will kick in right away, but he'll still be fully functional. If you try to jog or jump-start his memory, the locker will cancel out."

Even if his optics were locked on Prowl, the mech knew there was a question to be asked--as though he needed to at least give a nod to the clean red symbol on his chest.

"And how does this keep us from simply jogging his memory files and retracing your route?"

"They never see where we go—and you'll be stuck with an unsalvageable malfunction." Fender chuckled, ugly and deep, when the mech just stared at him. "Believe me, you don't want your new toy to remember this place. I've seen 'bots go deranged after having their memory files unlocked. Keep it where it is. That way, your investment won't fritz on you, 'cos Primus knows you paid a clean credit."

They propped the black bike onto his pedes and he remained standing when they moved away, visor lit a somnolent, disconnected back-up blue. Jerky and slow and heavy with the inhibitor, he was capable of movement if propelled by a guiding force but simply _stilled_ precariously when untouched. The white mech trembled when he reached for him, blue optics wide. Stacks caught his shoulder again.

"Remember. Thirty-six megacycles. If you wanna to install any behavioral rewrites, do it before then but use a good hacker. Really, I'm serious: this slaggers a fighter."

Fender led them out of the door and out into the white-hot suns light, watching an entirely different creature leave out than the sniffy bastard that came in, too-carefully guiding the lifeless black model step by halting step over the red sands. It was a wonder they didn't offline him on sight. Suspicious little glitch… but still.

"Enjoy your purchase."

Boss'd be pleased in the long run. No one could say no to a payoff that big, even if it meant losing a playtoy.

* * *

There was not much strength left. He used all of it up _getting through that place_ and getting to his ship and guiding Prowl--_Prowl_, smaller and slighter and creaking alarmingly--ahead of him, word by word and step by step. On the way in, the last of his desperate resiliency gave out with an inaudible, messy crack; he stumbled and Prowl's pede caught on his. They both fell to the blue-lacquered floor in a cacophony of metal-on-metal clangs and slams, but he grabbed for the other mech. Prowl fell against him, doll-like and lukewarm and horribly quiet.

Unable to restrain himself anymore, Anicon melted.

He finally rushed the rigid, naked bike with greedy, despairing, hysterical touch, all flinty posture sloughing off. His rounded face filled with intense pain as he wrapped his arms around the other mech and held him close to his quailing center, simply _reconnecting_ to the echoing, nearly mythical creature with the push of his healthy Spark, feeling the other's tortured existence in all of its silence--and grieving that he could not have come sooner.

"Oh, Primus. P-prowl. Oh, what have they done to you?"

Source hidden behind a blank, cracked visor, the weak buzz of black stasis was his only answer.


	38. Dead End

A/N: Oh my Primus, I adore all of you! Your reactions are so funny; I'm downright shocked I managed to SURPRISE some of you with that move! Keep guessing, I love to see what you have in mind for the little swooning Elite and his new... FRIEND?

Oh Swindle, I know. Emotions are yicky and the world would be better if no one had them. (I actually wish I could have made him out as more of an evil ass, but… yeah.)

Also? Freakin' hell, Lockdown. Freakin'... hell.

* * *

Dead End

* * *

He never imagined that it would come down to _him_.

A flexible phrase, as it were, to come _down_—because as the months crept by, Swindle paid piecemeal witness to what could only be called a lethal downwards spiral in his long-time business contact. With his pretty Autobot toy ripped out of his close-quarter world, Lockdown actually… crumpled. He locked up, shut down, and, of all horrors, channeled every last iota of energy towards _searching_ for the little leech.

Not just _waiting_. Not just _keeping a sensor onlined_ in the hopes he might _run across_ him after a while. Active, resource-draining, obsessively methodical investigation.

For weeks? No. No, weeks he could understand. It was the proper mourning for the termination of a tryst and an easily-coerced source of physical pleasure; the proper grasp-grope for an investment that had flown the coop. Swindle himself had priced those mods and he had to admit they were handsome.

But the old mech had been at it for months.

Swindle had never seen a 'bot throw himself into something so colossally hopeless—nor could he ever have expected it of a mech as cunning and realistic as Lockdown. All he could do was sit back and smile and shake his head with a 'Nothing today, chief' look and hope that the antique would break out of his little senile snit-fit with the proper proposal and following lucrative exploit. Just a good run, something to quicken his oil and get him _back on track_. He even held back on his own opinions and servo-rubbing impatience, only contributing the occasional nudge towards the ages-old conclusion that the little Autobot simply wasn't _necessary_ to big guns and an even bigger cut of the meaty intergalactic payoff pie—what lovable, limited Lockdown had always held as his street-wise religion and sole concerns.

Even as the situation kept _worsening_ against all odds and practical reason, leading to a toxic disinterest in collaborations and other silent sliding losses that even a fifty-fifty split couldn't match credit-for-credit, Swindle kept hoping—_expecting_--the next time he checked in with the other mech would find the antique lounging in his scratched-up chair like the crusty, appraising sloth he was, once more shining with a new chartreuse mod and an itch to use it on some unsuspecting bystander or a guilty-enough bounty mark. But no.

Eight some-odd months since Swindle had made the connection between his two clients. Eight some-odd months since Lockdown had simply stopped listening to him and answered everything with a slow, dark shake of his head. He was _running down_, pins slipping, gears sticking.

And it actually weighed on him.

It? His _involvement_ in this puppet show, a nebulous non-concept and completely devoid of personal consequences! Swindle's only crime was passivity and utter client confidentiality, but every time he left listless, glaring Lockdown to the dark of a terminated commcall, the noose tightened; his compadre's slow spiral wound round his here-to-fore unknown crumple-zone. The arms-dealer had felt _pressure_ before, certainly—been under as many high-stress business situations as a turncoat intergalactic emissary and never had a crack to show for it--but Primus, it was so _uncomfortable_! Maybe it was just impatience, maybe it was disgust, but it had never gotten into his _tubing_ before, never dug in and scuffed his polished shell.

In the end, no one, not even Swindle, was truly amoral—or at least susceptible to the repercussions of others' morals. He wasn't going to get his business partner back at all, it seemed, unless something _happened_ and watching a fellow entrepreneur and _safe bet_ simply wind down and die in the void of his little partner's absence was maddening in some big-enough way.

Was it a smart decision? Certainly not. Was it a fair trade? A doomed situation in exchange for grievously misdirected hatred…

"Got… something for you, LD. No, hold on. It isn't a job. Not this time."

It was as good as turning his prized plasma arm-canon around and shooting himself in the chamber. Poof. Gone.

If Lockdown only knew what he had been _dealing_ with, the amount of secrecy these clowns functioned under… he might even think his solicitor slightly heroic, but of course it didn't come across that way. Even so, the blocky mech might have escaped unscathed, tossed aside by Lockdown's haste: the superficial urgency of the long-rusted situation rendered the strangely quiet arms-dealer no more than a carrier of information and, once it was extracted, no longer of interest. But no. In his one moment of something close to kindness, Lockdown caught him by his piping.

The hulking bot's long-dim optics flared scalding red at the description of the mods and his servo creaked into a fist… and Swindle lost. Even as he received the most welcome, specific news he'd ever hoped for and found an end to so many months of intense, smothering informational darkness, the old mech noted with a savage speed how Swindle wasn't _preening_: wasn't flourishing and grinning and asking for his payment ahead of the game even as he knew he wouldn't get it. The very rage that the arms-dealer had counted upon for his own inconspicuous exit doubled in the crucible of Lockdown's abused chassis. Things _clicked_ and the look of blistering fury on the old mech's face as he cut the call off without another word (because Lockdown didn't have _time_ to rage and _accuse_ him of lying through silence when his insubstantial partner was still trapped) was enough to make Swindle wish, for the first time, that he'd been more of an aft about things.

But it was over. He'd done the hallowed, feared, suicidal _right thing_ for the first time in his long, crime-spattered function and all he had to show for it was a curious, stunned buzz in his processor and the decidedly unpleasant knowledge that he would probably never again be welcome in Lockdown's ship or company. Never again would the other seek him out for drinks. Advice. The odd laugh.

Swindle took the loss of his almost-friend with a ponderous too-large quiet, all of the rattling collisions and acidic coincidental consequences leaving the arms-dealer with a single resounding question: one he knew would never be answered but by the final flickers of his Spark when the Well—or Pit—overtook him.

"Why," he asked the vast, impartial void of magenta-glassed space, thumbing haltingly at his chin, "does everyone insist on taking things so _personally_ all the time?"

* * *

The thing that hurt the most?

"_I can only give you the coordinates. You gotta do the RPMs yourself."_

It had been beneath his pedes from the beginning.

Beneath his pedes or in front of his optics every time Swindle called in, always with that same impartial grin. How long had the filthy slagger been keeping this, coveting it like a Primus-damned piece of trivia? One, two, three—five months? More? All while he ripped through the stars, planet by planet, servos fastening on _nothing_.

_Nothing_.

All while Prowl disappeared further, planet by planet by star by star and a mirroring distance tire-jacked his insides, crunching vital warm components. Wrecking him in his empty ship.

Some part of him, old and shrewd, understood that Swindle had no reason to do him favors—that his partnership didn't matter in the slightest to the other mech's aloof, oil-slick machinations because it didn't _pay off_--but that part was eclipsed by the battered, howling majority that propelled him through the bright green undergrowth, the same undergrowth he'd crashed through for those four tenterhook megacycles when he thought Prowl was _just out of reach_. A rough facsimile of screaming scalding steam energy punched through his substructure in devastating rhythm: for months, it had kept him online whenever he passed the empty room and Prowl's little stone tree. It was mad, bare, insubstantial yet painful enough to keep him moving. Always moving, processor clouding and clearing in bursts.

Lockdown could say he had searched everywhere, but that would be a gaping lie and an impossibility. There were too many places to search. The sheer numbers—planets, leagues, countries, war-states, cities, swarming dumb inhabitants--of the cavernous galaxies had overwhelmed him on more than one occasion… and here _he_ was. The entire time.

He knew no one left the planet. And he had stayed. For solar-cycles, he had stayed, hovering and scanning, Spark slamming in his chamber as it simply failed to make sense…

He found the wide, sloppily-hidden hatch after a megacycle of groping through the too-familiar foliage and cleaning up the coordinate approximation Swindle had given him. He kicked it up with a clang—nothing but waxy puppet green upon a metal lid, obvious as _Pit_ but nothing to an organism-focused surface-scan because they had dragged Prowl under, smuggled him limp and fizzling at his receptors—and tore down the dirt tunnel, Spark condensing into a furious black sun as the underworld became darker and darker with every slamming step.

Lockdown burst into the main chamber and stopped, red optics flaring in the solid underground night. He didn't have time to think about whether it was suspicious that he hadn't been apprehended or tracked, nor the fact of what he was crashing into; he simply _moved_ toward the promise of black plating and a smart blue visor. He flicked his night-vision on, poison-green cite mowing through the rows of black slabs arranged through the middle of the low-hung dirt chamber, broken only by sets of red and blue dots, all glowing faintly—

He felt the truth of it before he saw it in detail; before the night-vision recalibrated and fleshed the slabs out into slack limbs and distorted mouths and chipped gaping chambers with even dimmer Sparks. The chamber was too quiet, almost abandoned. The thick brown air carried only a Spark-deadening buzz as tangible as the suffocating stench. That buzz hit him and got inside his girders like an itch because even though they were all so _still_, he reeled briefly at the dead feel of so many Sparks, smothered into utter stillness in cold suspended bodies. Not offline—no, that would have been _silent_ and still--but in the slow, maddening process of going offline. This wasn't a graveyard. It was a holding cell.

Torque. She was right.

_Prowl_.

He felt ghost pinches at his carpal joints and his Spark convulsed; blazing numbness spreading like sepsis through his dry, cracked insides, Lockdown ran down the first row, optics locked on the ghastly parade of frozen shells, all rusting in the dark, clumped wires vomiting out of gaps in their armor. Several, dirty tubes still hanging from their mouths, had gone offline and still they hung, spotted with messy, toothy holes cut from into the armor where parts had been ripped out, old oil rimming the post-mortem wounds. Substructure tightening, Lockdown looked frantically for a sliver of teal visor; he looked for his small, dark partner whom he'd lost, who had been dying here, captured and strung up and suffocated at his warm, brave center for nearly a stellar-cycle while he groped and pushed himself into senseless methodical investigations--

Lockdown turned the corner, slamming down on something small and stooped that lurched across his path. He recoiled at the first real sound he'd heard, a bizarre raspy scream that sliced through the motionless non-air; a klik later, his swamped sensors relayed a warm, slick presence on the bottom of his pede. A crunched shell of something lay writhing on the waste-smeared ground, bright oily eyes bulging, wet organic innards opened and halved by the cold weight of his pede. It stilled, more fluids burbling out and staining the ground green-black.

He pushed on.

Rows. Rows and rows, dull metal and smeared with filth. Some all femme; some mixed. Nearly mad, he broke through another row, numbed to the vacant optics turned toward him from every shell and crushing the thought that _Prowl wasn't there_ even though it made horrible sense for him to be--when the lights flickered on and he saw black and gold. Not on a table.

It was in a corner. All of him, down to the jump-jet boosters. Surrounded by scuffed, piecemeal modifications in green and red and orange and grey, elegant Prowl was piled like refuse on the grey-brown ground, golden horns still gleaming.

Something snapped behind him. Prying his optics from the _pieces_ and deactivating his night-vision, Lockdown turned and a live mech was there, red optics wide and radiating vibrating, clean life. He kicked into instant motion as he saw the green mech move: it was involuntary and thank Primus that it was. Cursing, his target sprinted to the right into a row of 'bots and Lockdown pursued. The bounty hunter turned the corner in time to see the mech straighten and fumble with _his_ EMP generator, arm out and shock still stretching his face. The hunter saw it but didn't register the eternal threat: he was restricted to hot-oiled primordial rage and the instant the deadly mod clicked in and sent a haphazard burst of yellow energy into the semi-dark, the mech was on the ground with a short clang.

Lockdown came down so hard he dented the other's abdominal plating nearly to his struts and he screamed in pain; the sickening hiccup sensation and cracking sound of a pressurized pipe breaking and flooding the other's insides with brutal air was cut off by the triple-click and vicious bray of Lockdown's chainsaw, yellowed blades rattling within inches of the other's face.

"Where is he?!" he roared over the other's doubled screams and the sound of his own menace, muscling the green mech further into the ground with his crushing claw servo, tightening dangerously over his chamber plating. "Bike model, gold and black! Where _is he_?!"

He repeated it, growing louder and closer until the mech stopped pleading to be let go or simply cursing in paralyzed fear. Finally, he wrung three words out.

"I—slag, I dunno!"

It wasn't good enough. Not after eight months. Tensors whipping tight, Lockdown slashed his chainsaw across the tender seam between the arm and the chassis-plating, digging hatefully into the sticky ripping sensation and the high-pitched scream. The mech arched, convulsing as sparks flew.

"Those are his mods!" the hunter snarled into his twisted face. "You have him, where is he?!"

The mech could no longer vocalize; reduced to hysterical static as oil and toxic-bright energon flowed from the dark hole, he convulsed for long, creaking nanokliks until his vocals suddenly snapped back in, distorted by the pain.

"He went… went out with the ship and he didn't come back! They sold him, Primus, _please—_oh god, Primus, please--"

They had shipped him out. Which meant he wasn't there. Which meant…

Bitter fear flooded his substructure. Prowl receded further into the darkness of the empty universe and the beautiful mods grew colder, more and more like _remnants_; Lockdown dug his claw into the other's chassis-plating until it cracked.

"_Where are your records_?"

"We don't keep records!"

Before he could process it—he didn't stare into the other's flickering red optics, did not stop to consider the quailing 'bot beneath him with any measure of direct fleshy vengeance—he succumbed to a death rattle. He succumbed to the fact that he wasn't going to get Prowl back, not from this Pit. Lockdown blacked out physically, impulses spurting directly from his wounded Spark: his claw came unseated with a squeal of metal only to be replaced by the ripping rattle of his chainsaw, plunging into the shielded glowing heart of the mech with a messy burst of sparks. The yellow Spark energy, hysterical and sizzling, jolted up his arm; the scum went offline with a single jerk, mouth stretched wide.

Lockdown jerked the limb free with a whir (fighting out of the now-grey metal slit and shredding the corpse's brittle plating, sending shrapnel into his own face) and heaved himself upright. Prowls mods still gleamed in the corner, a silent, still testament to what he'd been through before being thrown to some corner of the universe. Stripped. Disassembled. Abused.

Never knowing precisely when he stopped asking questions, Lockdown ripped into all of them.

He found them or they came running to the noise, three more of them. He didn't use the EMP gen, once more a cold presence in his arm. He fought them down. Crushed them. They all resisted, grasping for weapons or help, except for the femme. When she saw him, spattered with oil and energon and optics ablaze with barbaric hatred as he slammed the makeshift door off its hinges, she opened her arms and let him murder her. She sighed as she went offline, ravaged internals decompressing and he flung her body off of his numb chainsaw with a spray of dark oil, mirroring that damn red Autobot from so long ago.

Had he come so far? Had he gone back to his beginnings?

For a terrifying moment, it was as though nothing had changed; that Prowl had made no print on him and the quiet, smiling ninjabot had never existed at all and he was still tearing into jaded Autobot captains with nothing to lose. As though he'd lost what he had never had. But no.

He'd gone back to the beginning--come back only to lose him again. Prowl was gone. Couldn't be tracked. Could be… anywhere.

Lockdown stood over the broken, gashed body of the blue femme and his chainsaw quieted to a hazy, shocked growl. The old musclecar froze, staring into the dark of the small, filthy room he'd found her in. Body reduced to a shuddering husk, his Spark seemed to sound out: the frequency pressed into the dark air, seeking… a way forward. A future. An option.

The petrified waves came back empty. Dead end.

Once more, something moved behind him. Lockdown turned; wires as hot as a sun, he lunged and rammed the intruder against the carved-dirt wall before he realized what it was, every tensor utilizing the full heft of his horrendous two-ton poundage. Half blind, he bucked against the sinewy appendages that twined so fiercely around his wiry joints—until he jerked and gouged and cut one of them off and the thing _squealed_ and the appendage thrashed on the ground and he pressed more and a wet crack resulted.

Venting air quickly, Lockdown looked down at the thing against the wall. Perhaps because it was hideous, or perhaps because he felt some primal shudder of recognition built into his very base coding, his optics widened and his processor seemed to void. Wounded and bleeding on the inside and outside, the thing _waited_. Though he couldn't understand it, he could feel it, manic and hateful. Staring.

"What the Pit are you?" he hissed finally, processor blown from raw shock. The creature laughed with bubbling difficulty, voice as rough as sin.

"Your creator. Forgotten and victorious."

Lockdown stared and stalled, insides grinding painfully. Then he pressed in, demanding the only thing he could think of. The only thing he thought of.

"Where's Prowl?"

Boss, one hundred millennia old and as toxic with hatred as with the slow sting of life, didn't know the name. He didn't need to.

"Where it deserves to be," it rasped thickly, eyes flickering a desperate brown-red through the mask-like holes of its warped face. "Where all of your kind deserve to be. With whomever paid the correct price."

He didn't black out.

Consciously, silent as the void his life was suspended in, Lockdown drew back and tore in. He destroyed and purged and murdered the creature down to his last throbbing spider nerve-cell, operating from inherent fear and frenzy and the chasm of eight months. For cycles and cycles more, gore flipping up and smacking the walls with slick noises, the old mech destroyed the screaming thing that had stolen his partner. Twice.

After the last recognizable feature was gone, gutted and gored and gashed into a greasy, fleshy lump of red, Lockdown staggered back into the main chamber. The hopeless choral buzz swarmed him, saturated and sapped him, beating his dark Spark into a quivering ball as he gathered up Prowl's perfectly preserved modifications in his huge gore-smattered servos, every gentle clank echoing in the dark.

He got a sack. Wrapped them. Carefully.

Then Lockdown took one long, blank look at all the rusted-at-the-wrists mechs and femmes, some of them models so old he could scarcely remember seeing the like in his own time, and searched until he found oil. Then, slopping the dark substance on the rows and rows and rows, he set fire to the last place Prowl had been.

He watched as the flame, subdued by the brown nitrogen air, ripped through the rows like razorblades and set them to a slow, total burn. Wires melted and weak Sparks shuddered into nothingness; the preserved horror and anguish of the frozen mechs whipped him into crushed silent paroxysms as metal warped and glass cracked. Because any one of them could have been his Prowl. Everyone of them was. Forgotten or betrayed or stolen. He left it to burn, poisonous smoke following him into the yellow sunlight.

Once back aboard his empty ship and leagues deep into black space, he sat in his chair and simply held Prowl's cold pieces in his lap, running his shaking digits over the helmet's brave wicked horns over and over and over.


	39. New

A/N: Oh dear, I'm in for it. Some of you have already guessed the next hurdle… or banned me from doing it! XP Oh, Ani. Just… oh Ani. Such a hopeless, somewhat-conniving little fluffball D:

Things (mostly the state of Prowl's memory and Ani's stalkerish tendencies) will be confusing at first, but you'll get the general oh-we're-shafted drift.

Beeteedubbleyew, NEW TFA MOVIE TOMORROW!?!??!?! Augh! Bring on season three! …And have it end with Lockdown stealing Prowl away yes? YES?

* * *

New

* * *

Megacycles and megacycles later, Prowl rebooted with a nauseating mechanical heave, polluted energon slopping at his capacitors.

It was quiet. Very quiet. Beyond sick, he vented sour air, pressurizer whining into the dark of his offline optics. Slowly, function bloated with the weight of the inhibitors, the hazy mech initiated a basic self-scan. Running at a shivering 47.38 percent efficiency, he was nonetheless parallel with the nearest identifiable 'ground' concept and his limbs were loose and by his sides. He tested them. They scraped against the… berth.

The ability to register physical stimuli was all he could claim. He was uncertain of everything from his location to the last span during which he had been fully alert, all existence slippery and segmented like ravaged organs. The moment his sensory field expanded from its wounded, energy-conserving clutch around his limp body, however, he gained a level of concentration borne only from fear: alongside a faint, circular stimulation of his pede, an electrical signature burned at his side. Cybertronian.

Systems jolting to red alert, Prowl onlined his optics and pushed himself up off the berth, vertigo rushing his brittle equilibrium chip. A cry sounded to his left and something fluttered against his servos so he grabbed it: the moment he realized it was a length of organic cloth, he wrenched it free of the other Cybertronian's grip and flung it over the white form, tensing in blind instinct for a flip--

"No—no, no! Prowl, _stop_!"

--and in one vicious pinch of his circuitry, something much more than momentum was sucked out of him in mid-air. Prowl went limp under the expert, red-lit pressure and crashed to the floor with a thick clang, visual field striped with ugly, painful grey static, scarring the cream of the unknown room. As he lay there, Spark convulsing, _unable to move and cut off from his motor functions by an ice wall,_ the threatening electrical blot rushed him and servos closed on his arm and turned him over.

"--you. Please stop moving, you'll only, um, only hurt yourself. Oh, Primus, that inhibitor must still be in your system--oh n-no--"

Prowl winced, feeling some of himself come unlocked with the shift. Those same servos cupped his face; he offlined his failing optics and blocked out the blurry white mech who held him, too exhausted to attempt to fear him, even in darkness. His body spiraled after the physical shock, craving blank recharge. Instinctively, for reasons he didn't understand, Prowl went into a full-system twitch at the idea (heavy, nauseatingly thick forced down his upper intake valve, ragged rust _ache_ helpless) of stasis, unable to stop another groan as his pistons hitched painfully.

Movement was… foreign. Hurt.

"Prowl. Prowl, can you hear me?"

The vocals, strangely, were twice as fearful as Prowl should have been—but then he heard his name. His _name_. It was as though a sensor had been struck: he gave an immediate response to the sound and the concrete meaning of it. Mouth twisting, he managed to make an acknowledging sound. Raspy and static-rough as it was, it still made the other sigh deeply.

"Prowl, you're… you're safe now. No one will… I _promise_, you are protected." Anxiety pulsed from his fellow, as tangible as his energy signature. Servos brushed at him again, along with a soft, soft plea: "Please don't try to move anymore."

Prowl couldn't move to defend himself and that was enough to call up a suffocating storm of neural-network panic in his tired substructure, but the touch and the words were so _different_ that he gave into the commands. He allowed (or fell into, helplessly) the push-pull rearrangement of his body as he was propped against a nearby wall, then managed to online his optics again, dully aware of his auditory units hissing uselessly. Outlined in low-resolution but steady feed was the mech who took him (from where?), young face alight with the blue shine of his optics and his fiery concern, carefully and—Prowl searched the word, rifling through connotations in his ravaged banks—dotingly stroking his cheek.

For cycles, he did nothing but look. He ached down to his wiring, down to his Sparkchamber, and a hunger so old as to be beaten into his every cracked wire seemed freshly awoken by the impact of his fall, soon to be howling at his empty energon cells… but for now, he simply looked, and the unknown mech watched him in turn with wide optics.

"Prowl," he repeated and smiled as though he might break with too much visual input. Prowl's engine gave a weak mumble.

"Who… are you?" Prowl rasped after a moment. His search for the words—and his vocals—left him with little more than a feedback-clouded hiss. Barely intelligible. The mech's face, formerly radiating concern, went rigid.

"Prowl?" he whispered faintly.

The fear and devastation only took true root when Prowl shook his head very softly, glassy cracked visor angled in concern so nebulous as to be estimation. The mech aspirated anxiously, servo grasping at whatever part of Prowl he could reach. When the ninjabot responded to increasingly more pleading repetitions--of what he knew to be his name--with further blankness, the same tired head-shake and tired static, the young mech snatched his servo back to his petite white chassis, ran out and slammed the door behind him.

Prowl exhaled softly and, helpless to stop it, short-circuited into stillness.

* * *

Somehow, with his first few fumbling words, he had broken someone's Spark.

Shut in the adjacent room, the stranger took long to recover from the blow: Prowl dipped in and out of creaking alertness for at least two megacycles after his initial blow-out, left with nothing to do but send drowsy scans through his ill-maintained systems where they meandered like tingling tides. He heard an argument halfway through, but couldn't--

("—wiped him, they wiped him completely! P-primus, how can I—")

--make out the words. When the small white mech came back in, treading as carefully as he was to place his words, he regarded Prowl with an expression half haunted and half nervous; he sat once more by Prowl's side, slender servos clutching at his own legs.

"How do you f-feel?"

"I am operational," Prowl murmured after another moment of observing the other. It was all he could claim at the moment, with the painful state of his body. Something, some sort of stringent self-control and practiced strength, kept him from voicing the extent of his lingering injuries while more important information was missing. When the other mech fell silent again, short words spent, Prowl could not keep his wounded peace.

"How did you… locate me? Where am I?"

"I've… been looking for you a long time, Prowl. Having others look for you," he explained mournfully. "And you're in my home. You've b-been here before."

Prowl could only stare as the stranger pressed at his own face, aspirating long and slow and steadying. Why would this mech be looking for him—or know his name, for that matter?

"What… um, what can you remember?" he whispered, as though the very words hurt him; wrenched at the clean, orderly insides that Prowl could not claim. "I m-mean, past your… when you were with those 'bots."

Disoriented as he was, the bike knew that this mech was not to be feared, quiet and vulnerable as he was: he had no room left in him for anything but weary compliance regardless. Processor strangely _skipping_ the 'with those bots' allusion in a clever-click squirm of coding (the same feeling compelling him to not ask _where_ he had been found), Prowl frowned slowly, head bowing as his visor dimmed and the muted whirs of a memory-file scan vibrated out of him. The whirring stopped. His visor re-lit and he shook his head.

"Nothing," he said curiously, weakly, as though the chasm inside him was something to be inspected at length. "Nothing concrete."

The mech pressed a servo to his mouth, catching a bit of air with a painful sound and shuttering his optics. Prowl watched. Wary though he was of the entire situation, battered technologically and mechanically with a void in his memory files to show for it, he seemed to be in a safe enough place… and he was still observant enough to discern that his lack of knowledge injured the other. Deeply. Bracing himself, a bit stronger for the snippets of recharge but still too scattered to catch the other's real hints, Prowl leaned forward with a creak and politely touched the other's rounded pede.

"Do I know you?"

"Oh. Oh, um. Y-yes," he whispered and nodded faintly, his energy signature palpitating and pushing out anxiety and _pain_. Prowl frowned again.

"How?"

"We were…"

The mech unshuttered his optics and shivered.

"We were lovers."

Prowl made a painfully blank sound. The mech seemed to shut down inside and hug himself a little more tightly, looking down at the sand-colored floor with empty blue optics. They sat in silence for long, long cycles.

"I… I apologize if I am slow to…" Prowl began hesitantly, raising a servo because, witnessing the agonized quiver of the other mech, there was no physical way to doubt his word.

The word. Lovers.

Though he could remember nothing past the dark that preceded this chamber and this 'bot, Prowl knew in his core that he was not a protoform. He had been left alone and alert for over a megacycle while the little mech recovered from his (now, deservedly traumatic) blow, which was more than enough time to take stock of every technomechanical record he had stowed away in his battered insides. His chronometer recorded his function at well over three-hundred stellar-cycles and his motor relays and processor were rife and textured with the knowledge that had enabled him to flip from the berth. 'Prowl', as his tag confirmed, had a life before this but seated though he was, the disoriented creature nearly staggered under the weight of an entire unknown standard, dropped on his head to rival a physical blow.

Condensed in a single mech and a single sentence so soon after complete contextual oblivion, there existed an echoing relationship he knew nothing about. He didn't even have the most rudimentary of regard or affection for his rescuer, while the other's blooming, complex aura of _care_ and a built-up relationship struck him numb and it showed on his long face. Prowl's Spark quailed wildly, lost.

"No, it's… um. It's fine," the other lied softly, vocals ripe with ache—the ache of expectation set aflame and seared to the bone. After waiting for him, after rescuing him (from what?), there was nothing. Prowl, nearly feeling the deep sorrow as though it were his own (he had lost someone as well—himself), refreshed his still-rough vocals.

"What is your name?"

The placement of the question couldn't be helped, but it made the other wince after such a revelation. His lover. The white mech let out a miserable sound.

"A-Anicon."

Prowl frowned slightly, logic drive out of sync.

"If you are…" Term-search. "--Cybertronian, why is your name so—"

"It's, um. M-my warden is very well-traveled. He named me after a star-cluster, so it's bound to be a little… strange," he explained dully, then paused, fumbling with his too-slender digits. "He intended me to be the same."

"Strange?" Prowl asked after a moment, looking at him oddly. Anicon almost jumped. Then, he reached back to toy with his antennae, vocals thick with an impending emotional collapse.

"Um, no. Hah. Well-traveled."

Not knowing what else to do—with a certain synthetic urge to quell the rising tremor in the young thing's servos and vocals, his wounded wilt so akin to the flora he studied—Prowl smiled slightly.

"And?"

Anicon, now named and quantified, looked up at him blearily.

"Where have you traveled?" Prowl asked, honestly intrigued and desperate for a well-spoken distraction in such quiet madness. Anything to keep from drowning in his own confusion. "I do not know names, but you could… tell me about them, if you wish. I would enjoy hearing it."

"You… would enjoy traveling?" The other mech asked him slowly, regarding him with a tightly-held wariness.

"Indeed," Prowl agreed after a bit of thought—then turned to the other as though seeking some form of rudimentary approval.

"Elaborate," Anicon said, tense gaze never wavering. "Please."

"I believe it would be… the greatest pleasure the universe could offer. Traveling and gaining knowledge from each destination, with no final goal in mind. Simply… a journey to take until the end of function."

It was simple enough.

But unbeknownst to him, the quiet rhythm of his speech—the candid intrigue of foreign lands, the formal vocabulary and a hint of his Art's teachings—shone true for Anicon in a way the ninjabot could not comprehend. Prowl only saw the other mech staring at him and knew, somehow, that he had recaptured the white mech's hope in a single stumbling opinion. His suspicions—hopes, also—were affirmed when Anicon reached forward _far too fast_ (threat) but only grasped his servos. He pressed them to his mouth and kissed them before having some sort of violent off-topic realization, then ran out of the room again with a quick clang-clang-clang-slam.

Prowl hardly had time to recover from the flurry of possible epiphanies before Anicon was back with a tray of energon and a gushing well of apologies and his insides nearly knotted into mechanical arrest at the sight of it. As suspected, his hunger was back full force, only intensified by the slosh-sloshing jug of oil accompanying the gently-humming pyramid. His body was in pieces, he realized with a stunned jolt, and 47.38 percent had coasted down to 39.3 and he hardly waited until the tray was on the ground before seizing a cube and tipping it into his mouth, both servos cupped tightly around it.

It was liquid salvation, lighting his tubing into thrumming pink highways and sending tingling salve into the deepest corners of his dry, neglected substructure. Primus, but the _feel_ of it. It was mid-grade (Anicon, fretting at his side, was afraid high-grade would have nauseated him), but it was more than enough to give him that sick-sweet jolt of tipsiness after such starvation, so he ceased gulping after the second cube, then restricted himself to normal swallows for fear of that ticklish sensation webbing over his already-hazy faculties.

Hunger slightly sated, granting a new gleam to his dusty logic drive, he regarded the other mech somewhat warily, but Anicon only cradled his chin in his servos and gave him a look so complex and full of swooning _relief_ that it dissolved the bike's wariness out of surprise. After a moment, Anicon reached out and touched the ninjabot's scratched-up chassis, delicate digits splaying over his now-steady Spark. He looked up and smiled.

"You really are yourself, aren't you?"

It was the most comforting thing Prowl had heard in what seemed to be his entire function. Something, at least, was right with him. Smiling his first real smile, he took his third cube of energon with a nod and, with Anicon's halting stories, began to rebuild his world.


	40. Starting Over

A/N: And the plot thickens once more—only this time, much like curdled milk.

I'll tell you in advance, guys, this is going to be a long and difficult haul, but I promise there's betrayal and intrigue (and Anicon-simpering XD) enough to keep you busy :3 And no, stop your worrying: there won't be a sad ending to this arc.

Well… sad in the traditional sense. It's complicated. Trust me?

Also, I've realized I seriously need help. I can't go on any longer without a Beta reader: a classically knowledgeable person, mind, who can help me with mechanics and style alike and _be honest_ with critique. I'm getting too... befuddled with my own words/message and I'm sorry if this (LONG DRAGGING UGLY) chapter is somewhat lacking because of it. So, if you think you can help me on a weekly basis and ravage my chapters for all of their ugly errors, PLEASE EMAIL MEEE. PEEEEZ.

That said, enjoy and don't mind my quasi-religious pontifications! XP

* * *

Starting Over

* * *

Within a week, Prowl was running at optimum efficiency.

Honoring the polished churn of his technomechanical components, the ninjabot dedicated himself to absorbing everything he could about his new situation, leaving not so much as a hallway-twist or wall decoration unanalyzed. The 'facility' he found himself in was spacious and colored in creams and rich browns, located on a soft-grassed organic planet; a thick collection of tall, hard-centered and branching plant-organisms stood nearby, rustling serenely under the white sky. His new organic environment fascinated him with an immediacy both startling and pleasing, but he put most of his energy toward those mechs whose home he had found himself in.

Anicon, he learned, was a highly respected botanist and belonged to a prestigious Elite-based family unit, firmly tied into the upper strata of the Autobot heirarchy. His guardian and warden, Tinus, was a similarly soft-spoken, stocky blue and green mech with grey details who worked in some area of intelligence for the Elite Guard. Prowl was unsure which area, as the mech always absent on business or closed in his subterranean workspace and Anicon was never eager to talk about it. The younger mech had other things to worry about, like Prowl himself: for the first few solar-cycles, bringing in medibot after medibot to perform tests and scans alike, the scientist's only concern was the health of his companion.

The medics, Prime-level and unquestioning, came in waves for the first three solar-cycles. They replaced the cracked glass in Prowl's visor; cool relief at a cohesive visual field finally banished the prickly, difficult feeling behind his optics. Keeping him online the entire time (because he wasn't comfortable with being _put down_ and pressed into dark immobility), they fixed the hairpin fractures and ugly chips; they replaced tubing and reassembled his smallest, stinging components under the reassuring hum of a specialized EMP generator. Most of all, they gaped and prodded at the bizarre alien technology chugging away in his chassis. Replacing it with ordinary, clean, standard issue technology was out of the question as the pieces had wired themselves into the young bike's systems, but they did what they could to tune up what was there. Only the ugly, sloppy welding scar on his chassis remained untouched after their medical blitzkrieg, as the medics were no such cosmetic creatures; once the bike's stats were stable and strong, they shook the young Elite's servo and departed.

Overall, there was only one problem beyond Prowl's scan-affirmed blank memory banks. His body, inside and out, was the vision of a glossy new protoform, but the ninjabot's young blue-white Spark was… damaged.

Not precisely damaged, but in a state of energy arrest: it was half the expected diameter and in what the medibots called 'hibernation', an automatic protective measure taken in response to great physical trauma. Once informed, Prowl finally placed the uncomfortable suffocated feeling that stemmed from the wary, heavy ember smoldering in his chamber, but as with most things Spark-related, the medics could do little with the flickering enigma that powered their function. There were no gears to clean, no hard-drives to defrag. Time, they said, would be their best hope.

Leaving the bike model to stasis after the last and longest structural patch, the last attending medic drew Anicon aside and asked only (despite the vicious slashes in tender fuel lines and the plethora of seemingly sadistic injuries) what had happened to cause the upset with the patient's Spark. The young mech shook his head and dodged the question with a miserable murmur, memory files looping on images of the lurching orange-eyed organics staring at him from the dark between the tables. He thanked the last medic and showed him the way out, pushing past the other's concerned stare and signing off on the bill without looking. He never relaxed until the house was empty once more and he could focus on his situation: a nebulous, delicate thing as new to himself as it was to Prowl.

There were lines to toe; phases to respect. Once they no longer functioned on imperatives and life-or-deaths, the retreating tide of urgency left the Elite alone with a quiet, confused mech who still didn't know who he was.

Mindful of his ignorance in a way few 'bots would be when confronted with an utter loss of self, Prowl treaded carefully in every soft, piecemeal conversation. No, it was baffling that he could _hold_ conversations in such a contextual black hole, even ones as erudite and mild as the Elite remembered. Anicon approached him often after their first talk, seeing him at least three times a solar-cycle and taking care to walk beside him or ask him if he needed anything, always with the same shy affectation. Twice, they meandered around the compound grounds until Prowl could go no further; more often, the freshly-repaired bike was content to wander around the house or sit back and reaffirm his simple clean existence on a cool, comforting berth, Anicon curled at his pedes with a datapad and a portable holomonitor for his experimental data.

In some ways, existing—tracing the subtle trickle of energy and pristine coding through his wiring and neural net--was enough. In other ways, Prowl could not miss the chafing gap he had left in this mech's life or the blank nature of his foreseeable future. Caught in a net of crushed expectations, Prowl was in limbo and no matter how sweet and pleasing it was to be mobile (why?) and have reassuring company (or to not be _alone_), he needed more. Focus. Direction.

Finally, like the logical creature he was, he sat his little host down with the air of someone conducting a business meeting and asked him, quite simply yet as gently as he could, what they were going to do about this. Anicon, previously all sweet smiles, put his datapad down and looked at him so hopelessly that he nearly regretted it. An explicit statement of the differences of their worlds—a detailed, involved relationship, carefully nodded to as 'this'--rendered the younger mech silent for a near cycle of dimmed optics and bitten digits.

"What do you… want to do?" he finally whispered, giving Prowl the galaxy in a simple sentence. Intent clear in his demure blue optics, the Elite was offering him a way out and blessing to leave if it pleased his reserved, battered Spark. For a mech newly woken to his own existence, however, the world beyond a certain cream-and-brown compound seemed a cavernous enigma, cold and too large to swallow—especially when he hadn't yet conquered the gap within himself.

Prowl thought about it at length, processor humming solemnly.

"I do not know," he said slowly, visor bending.

"Then… please stay here."

The pleading request (accompanied and cemented by a pair of willowy little servos reaching for his and lacing through his cream digits) was scarcely out before Anicon brightened. Strange stutter-glitch lessening with his gusto, the young mech detailed the advantages of his decision: they were, after all, the only inhabited planet for eons and it wasn't safe for him to move about on a large scale yet, also they didn't have a ship yet, not to mention he didn't know anyone on the outside and anyone might betray his trust. This was the safer route, the better decision. Within a few chatter-stuffed cycles, the diminutive mech was truly excited that the other was staying with him; somewhat rattled by the bubbly new energy of his companion, Prowl made a wry comment concerning the shift, causing the other's delicate facial plating to warm to a somewhat satisfying pink.

It was impressive, Prowl thought later, that the young mech had been so willing to let him go; to let him make his own decision and follow his own path even though Anicon had such an attachment to him. He could hear the sorrow and the anxiety in his voice even as the scientist offered it to him and it made him yet more aware of the kindness being shown to him. He owed a great debt to the young mech… perhaps he did not know how great. Of everything he had managed to salvage from his processor and personality drive, however, Prowl retained a strict moral and life code. He needed some purpose to shape his life around; he needed a functional backbone.

"But what can I do here?"

It was a vague question, but it needed an answer. Previous relationship aside, the idea of simply coasting on the kindness of the Elite was nearly reprehensible to the ninjabot and an insult to his instinctual graspings for some measure of independence. Anicon thought about it for a cycle, antennae twanging when he arrived at a conclusion. He blushed again.

"You can serve as my… um, my bodyguard? If you want. Until you f-figure out what you want to do."

"Are you in much danger here?" Prowl inquired hesitantly, once more looking around 'his' room as though the placid compound façade was hiding spies and vagabonds in every nook and cranny.

"N-not necessarily. It was how we m-met, though," Anicon managed, then pushed past Prowl's lost expression by looking into his lap and speeding up somewhat pitifully. "And if you need something to do, I would love to… learn from you. When I'm not working, I mean. It would be a wonderful way to get to kn-know each other… again."

Prowl nodded after a moment: the orderly demand on his skills may even cause them to surface faster. In this way, he could focus his energy on instructing the younger mech on the basics of Metallikato and regain more of his metaphysical footing in the process. Seeing him agree, Anicon grinned so widely that it spilled over to Prowl, whose mouth twitched. Then, responding to a curt commsignal from his guardian, the little compact jumped up and gathered his things from his guest's floor, sunny grin only intensifying.

"W-wonderful! If you need anything or h-have any questions, please, _please_ let me know immediately. In the meantime, you can go anywhere you want. Anywhere you feel good enough to go, of course, and I promise you'll l-love the forest. Get to know the house. Maybe even… s-see if you might want to… stay longer than you thought."

As dark as their conversation had begun, a spry twinkle seemed to return to his host in the end. Hardly daring to even as he did it, Anicon stumbled up, hip-holster heavy with data-pads, and graced Prowl with a quick, shallow hug before skittering off to do whatever it was he did. And so they came to an agreement: Prowl would function as Anicon's bodyguard and instructor until further notice, using the stimulation to feel out his own personality and come to terms with himself. Until, came the unspoken hope, he decided to leave, regained his memory-files… or grew into the space he left behind and fell in love with his Sparkmate all over again.

Because as the slow, pleasant days stretched on, it became more and more obvious that 'lovers' had been an understatement.

No matter how well he hid it behind pointed politeness and a decently-wide berth, Prowl could sense untold intensity behind Ani's shy front. It was obvious that the white mech maintained the same strong level of affection towards him since that blank time before he lost his memory files, unable to stifle his emotion for a mostly-intact personality for simple sake of that selfsame personality's ignorance. It all came down to the fact that Anicon knew him as no one else did, though Prowl knew neither Anicon nor himself.

Though Prowl asked, Anicon, understandably, was reluctant to talk about their previous time together. It probably seemed to the tiny Elite a hanging expectation that it would be cruel to expect the wiped mech to fulfill: Anicon said he simply wanted Prowl to soak in his world and settle in, to see what came to him on his own. Prowl only caught snatches of his pristine previous existence, hastily plowed through and waved away if mentioned, but even those he picked up were valuable. Far from the stories and sentimental snippets being controlling or smothering, the ninjabot grasped for any semblance of stability and, as the saying went, if he did it once he could do it again.

After all, if his previous and current personalities coordinated, there had to be a still-relevant reason he had… loved the mech beforehand. True to plan, once things settled down after the Medibots, he could feel something nudging at him: a connection between the two of them, a warm, comforting affinity based on intellectualism and common interests. Anicon's adoration for him was palpable and his poor scorched processor craved any kind of positive stimulus and affirmation. Though tenuous, life progressed more and more easily. He felt content.

Still, there were… questions.

"What am I?"

It was his second week in the compound and he felt too akin to a whirring, chirping protoform to raise his voice above a murmur. They stood in the deep of the Elite's blue-lit lab, crowded on all sides by shelves of alien plants in varying stages of growth, some partitioned off from the rest due to exotic climate needs. Anicon smiled at him and retracted the lime-green magnifying visor from his round face, turning from the brilliantly blue plant frond he was studying.

"Autobot, of course," he supplied with a small laugh. He ducked his head somewhat, pretending to adjust his magnifier settings while his antennae twanged, endearing in their deceit. "You're so, um, handsome, what else c-could you be?"

Prowl knew it, of course: it was in his coding as a strong red undercurrent. He couldn't be Decepticon, but he wasn't quite Autobot until he heard another say it—the blank spot on his front only worsened the identity gap and made it harder to place himself with any conviction. He brushed his digits over it, long face somewhat sorrowful.

"But my—"

Anicon's optics widened with a shrill electronic chirp, as though it was the first he had seen the scuffed grey blemish (though the medibots most certainly had). He stood up so fast he knocked a pan of germinating seeds off of his desk, exclaiming:

"Your sigil! That f-fiend."

Within two solar-cycles, a brand-new Autobot symbol gleamed on his trim black chassis and the hissed entity remained unnamed and unexplained.

It was too early to ask specific questions: everything was far too overwhelming and, to cope, Prowl limited his existence to broad terms such as 'mech', 'Autobot' and 'cyberninja'. Still, perhaps encouraged by the question-girded, complex blankness to seek new memories he could eventually claim to the last detail, he pushed on. Anicon, sweet and sure, filled his solar-cycles with pleasant distractions, leading him by the servo down to his lab nearly every day.

Desperate to amuse and entice, the small Autobot scampered around, collecting organic oddities for him and nearly wrecking his lab in the process. One solar-cycle, he nearly buried himself under a mountain of seed-cultivation dishes while trying to get to a 'particularly fascinating' one at the bottom; Prowl's timely intervention was all that saved him from untold megacycles of clean-up, even it left both chuckling. Most times, he entertained the self-sufficient ninjabot with new discoveries and placed plants in his lap, always settling nearby and resting his chin on Prowl's shoulder while the ninjabot studied the exotic organisms with a reverent smile, their slender legs touching.

One white-washed afternoon, Anicon's constant, complex chatter drifted off as they walked around the edges of the clearing near the compound. After a moment of careful silence, he slipped his shaking servo into the black and cream one at his side. Prowl, a little unsure, smiled and let the small scientist lean into his neck with a soft, amorous noise, once more assured that he had a place in this quiet world. In that moment, it was all he could have asked for.

* * *

"Hate that room."

Torque, kneeling by the red glass of Lockdown's dark ship, looked up. It was the first thing he had said for megacycles.

"What?" she asked faintly, turning to study her old friend and placing her datapad to the side.

"Said I hate that room," he growled, vocals thick and abrasive from disuse. He didn't look up from his hunch in his navigator chair, dull red optics partially blocked by his own servos cupping his face. "His room. S'where they kept me. When it was… slag."

Hearing his vocals crack, the old femme quickly rose to her pedes and moved over to stand in front of him, taking the hulking mech against her chassis with a wounded puff of air from her vents.

"You don't have to tell me this, darling. You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to," she whispered, digits tracing sad, nervous patterns over his bowed helm, dipping into chipped gaps in his armor. "I understand."

"Kept me locked up for near to two months. Hate that room." He shook his head against her armor, then hissed, "Damn Autobots."

Spark flickering, she said his name as softly and as soothingly as she could and pressed her sculpted mouth to the top of his helm. She nursed a shocked and mournful feeling that he would take now to tell her what he never had before, not in long millennia of friendship, because they didn't speak of the past--but now was different. Now the bounty hunter was possessed of some nigh-hysterical rhythm, forced to finish what he had been thinking over in his empty ship and purge it from his aching, creaking body in some small sense.

"Rest of the ship was full so I put the kid in there. Afterthought. Not much space left. Thought I'd never have to go in there."

He stopped, flooded with the most mundane of memories: striding by and slamming on Prowl's door when they had landed. Meandering in and pinning him, mild smile unaffected by the sudden plane-shift and the eager gust of hot air, down onto his small berth. The time he caught the ninjabot carefully situating the tree he'd given him: Prowl had looked over his shoulder with a real smile and finished arranging the branches and Lockdown left him standing there, Spark doing stunned, blustering somersaults at the other's quiet contentment. He transformed the dark, restrictive storage space_ and prison_, gave it life and conservative, gold-trimmed personality—and now all that was left were the dusty heelcaps, an immortal tree and a cold datapad.

Gone.

Engine whining painfully, Lockdown crushed his tattooed face into his servos, pressing viciously at the delicate dermaplating until he could feel the sharp structural bars pinching underneath. Torque stroked his spiked neck, nodding slowly.

"We were in there more times than I can count. It was his. Didn't even bother me. She even… talked to him. Just like she did me. It's that damn room."

"I'm so sorry, Lockdown," she murmured against his audio-unit, bending to take more of him into her tough arms. They remained there for a long, long moment, shadows to all sides of them in the unlit ship; both sapped by memories and a gaping hole in either Spark. She parted from him with another embrace and a quiet kiss, watching the paralyzed musclecar (heavy, horribly dense as though he had been crushed by black space and the void Prowl left) for a moment before starting towards the hallway. The hallway that led to the room.

She hadn't yet… said her goodbyes.

She walked the length of the hallway, every step echoing in the chilly dark: Lockdown hadn't turned the main lights on since she arrived. Torque could only assume he had been surviving in the light of the stars and the smolder of Moot's backup lighting for nine months and her Spark clenched again at the thought. She knew how echoing and dark existence could be once the light of anyone's life was extinguished, especially without the gracious sting of closure. The femme stopped in front of the door, turning slightly when she heard Lockdown's vocals from the bridge.

"She's actin' up, y'know. Since he… isn't here, she's been tossin' fits. Misses him," he slurred, then paused. Something clanked. "Thinks I did somthin' to him. Like I did to her."

She shook her head mournfully, drew in a deep bit of air and opened the door. When she turned on the lights, however, she gasped and backed out, calling his name in alarm; her widened yellow optics locked on the intricate gold and black pile on the before-empty berth, elegant helmet set atop the armor. The careful memorial Lockdown had erected for his partner. Torque whirled and ran for the bridge, processor locking up.

"Where did it come from?" she demanded, stricken, white alarm stinging her every connective fiber. She strode toward him, servos out. "Lockdown, I don't… don't understand. Did Prowl have his armor on when he disappeared?"

"Lost him again, Torque," he rasped slowly into his servos, core hum reduced to a faint, Spark-deadening buzz. "Found where they had him. Lost him again."

Her Spark sank.

He hadn't been speaking to her. For months Lockdown hadn't been speaking to anyone, but she assumed he had been moving forward as best he could. Surviving and working. She only dropped by to check on his progress, but just now made the connection: silence was expected if nothing had happened, but he hadn't _told_ her anything. Things had gone on in the dark of their non-communication and now Prowl's remnants were carefully piled in his empty room, a haunting reminder of a crushed second chance.

"What haven't you told me?" she finally asked, going down on one knee and taking his long white face in her servo. He turned his head but she forced it back, gazing into his barely-lit optics. "Lockdown, you—you have to talk to me. Whatever it is, I need to know. Where have you _been_, what have you been doing? I thought you were—I-I don't know, taking jobs! You couldn't have found him--"

"Found one of 'em."

Torque stopped, frowning up at him.

"What?"

"Quints," Lockdown grunted, shuttering his optics. Preternatural silence filled the dark bridge: even the hum of life had been shocked out of the old femme. She stared at the bounty hunter. He didn't move. Didn't negate. Didn't elaborate.

"No," she whispered finally, vocals shorting slightly. Grasping. "It must have… been something else."

"I knew it. You know it like you know what side you're protoformed to. S'in here."

He tapped his helm, still in the dark of his own shutters.

"Bastards want us t'know it."

Her servos slipped from around his jaw and slid to her chamber paneling: underneath, her downy Spark shrank and jerked fitfully, cold with uncomprehending terror. Two worlds, horrifying myth and hard reality, crashed.

"What did you… do?"

"Killed it."

She vented air, slow and shuddering.

"It was evil, gal," he muttered, unshuttering his optics only to stare past Torque and into the red-glassed void of space. "How the Pit did those things make us?"

"But they didn't make us, Lockdown. They only provided the building blocks for their own selfish means: Primus sparked life into those bodies and we fought free as a people," she said, hushed, accented vocals turning fervent and thick as she worried and stroked at his spiked knee. "I believe that with all of me, darling. We didn't come from evil. Even if we did, we've grown beyond it. You can't think about it like that."

He didn't nod. It was as though he didn't hear her: his optics remained a dead brown-red.

"You were right," he said after a moment. "They had him all along."

"They had him," she repeated, stilling as everything sunk in. The meaning. What every solar-cycle wasted must have meant for a lost mech in the grip of a hateful, evil creature. The armor: what it meant to lose him again. Then she straightened, optics ablaze. "Where are they? If you killed the leader, you--_where are the rest of the captives_?"

"Don't matter."

"What do you mean?!" she snapped shrilly. "All of those 'bots belong to somebody: somewhere, there are other Prowls! Stolen loved ones, 'bots hurting just as much as you are!"

"They were all as good as scrap. Chambers hanging open. Optics burnt out on models as old as you or me. Some of 'em had been in there so long, chained up in the dark, they—" Something stuck within his aching insides; his motor revved, short and raw. He ducked his head again. "Burned 'em all."

Both sat in shocked silence, struggling slow and heavy to comprehend the final anguished flare—and eons of slow, silent suffering—of so many Sparks. The crackle of a slow, deep burn and peeling hardly made sense, blocked away in such a small ship. When Torque spoke, she could hardly keep her vocals from shaking.

"It was probably the kinder thing to do."

"Wasn't aimin' to be kind. Just needed to… burn something. Do something. Anything."

The need to simply _effect_ anything was a manic hunger, where months of all-consuming in-depth searching had yielded nothing but emptiness—then a betraying tip-off led him stumbling onto his partner's bones and the filthy scent of spilt oil. Months of torture, too many possibilities; hope ripped from his swollen core again and a slow return to his echoing ship. It was too much disappointment and helplessness for one old Spark to hold; Lockdown trembled for a moment before muscling it down into his scratched innards, aspirating haltingly and refreshing his vocals.

"What's next, gal?" the bounty hunter murmured, looking at his only friend with haunted optics, shadowed and empty like his ship. "What comes after this?"

Torque rose from her pedes with a muffled noise of anguish and fell into the huge mech's lap, wrapping her small frame around him; their sick, flickering Sparks dwindled together, separated only by the chilly knives of their chamber plating. She held him as best she could and his heavy arm fell around her side, barely brushing the raw patch of metal on his left thigh-armor. She buried her face in his neck and told him the truth—the only truth she had learned from millennia of loss.

"Survival. Stellar-cycles and stellar-cycles where the most you can hope to do is stay online and not think about him," she whispered. "Beyond that, I… just don't know, love. But you'll make it. I promise."

Slowly, his arms curled around her.

* * *

Another slow, pleasant week passed.

Prowl was comfortably settled (if not the slightest bit _lost_ in that nagging, out-of-focus way) and was in no want for fuel or other physical commodities. He began to adapt to his new environment and grow to acquainted with several certainties. The compound was quiet. The weather was fair. Tinus was rarely around; they had yet to exchange full sentences with one another. He spent his mornings training Anicon in what his body remembered, which helped him regain an overall natural techno-mechanical rhythm that soothed him more, he thought, than any information could—but therein lay another confusing factor.

In the beginning, Prowl had very little time to himself. Anicon planned it that way, he would come to realize, mostly because the scientist knew _what_ _he had come out of_ and he didn't want the disconcerted bike to feel alone in the barest of ways… but given time to delve into his own processor while reconstructing his Art, Prowl eventually realized he didn't quite have empty spaces there.

Rather, they were empty of the 'concrete', but also tinted with a certain feeling or color: emotions, sensations, reactions and actions. The abstract. The best he could sum it up, Prowl could remember the arc of a tossed object (high, fast, impressive) and the way it landed in his servos (quick, chilly, smooth texture, faint surprise), but not the actual identity of the object. He could remember… the rhythm of another life.

His declarative, event-based memory had been wiped, as best he could figure, but nothing else. It took a radically advanced, different breed of technology to record amorphous, chameleon _emotions_ rather than concrete facts and therefore Cybertronians possessed a very distinct memory-core section to synthesize and record such enigmatic Spark-generated information. His first, somewhat illogical doubts of bring freshly protoformed were proved utterly impossible by these lingering core shadows. Prowl had a history of horrifically scrambled sensations and impulses to draw from but no figures or places to play them out with. Still, what he felt was different--very different--from his current life of leisure. When he asked Anicon about it, he discovered something more: whatever had happened in the blank spot before he was pushed into Ani's arms wasn't necessarily the darkest time of his life.

* * *

"You've been… away."

It took him a very long time to find the words—even longer to meet Prowl's optics again.

"For how long?" Prowl asked softly, watching Anicon's tender expressive features carefully. The younger mech looked to the side, one servo pressed over his chamber paneling.

"Stellar-cycles."

Prowl frowned, attempting to fit the messy new pieces together and formulate his next query from thin air.

"Where?"

"I don't know." His mild vocals dropped to a hushed whisper. "You l-left with a Decepticon. A mech."

"A Decepticon?" Prowl exclaimed, digits twitching towards the glossy new Autobot sigil at his front; they stopped halfway and caught on the ugly scar around his chassis. He frowned deeply and shook his head, struggling to think past coded-in allegiance lines for an explanation. "What d—why? Did I know him previously?"

"No. We n-never… not Decepticons. Never."

Anicon, leaning against the wall by his berth with dimmed optics, offered no more. The room (spacious and well-lit, garnished with the pretty flowers the white mech had pressed into his servos with a besotted flicker of his optics) was quiet.

"But… my place is here," Prowl said uncertainly. It was all Prowl could offer; all he knew from his limited time with the other. "You said we had been partners for at least a century—"

"Lovers," Anicon said suddenly, optics wide. "N-not… partners."

"Yes," Prowl agreed after a moment, gaze locked on the other's sick expression. "But… why would I abandon you?"

"I never figured out why. You n-never said a word and one solar-cycle soon after we met him, you held me and told me you were sorry. I didn't understand. Then you were just… gone," he murmured brokenly. He worried at his neck, pushing thick air from his vents. "I think he… he must have blackmailed you."

Finally the fiend was named, in action if not in title. The one who burned off his sigil—and now, stole him from this life.

"How? With what?" Prowl demanded, alarmed. When Anicon simply shook his head, he thought further, finally gritting out, "Did he threaten you?"

Despite the shock, he was unable to feel immediate hatred for this nebulous enemy. His world was limited to concern for Anicon, obviously wounded from his betrayal. The ninjabot didn't understand how he—_he_? The old him, the new him, _if_ he still was himself, everything was so baseless—could have done this to someone who cared for him so strongly.

Intent on exposing the truth or condemning himself, Prowl pressed for details; for anything his companion remembered before he departed so suddenly. Anicon did not know any more. The disappearance was just as quick and stark as he initially explained, giving no insight as to his motivation, but the tiny compact offered a halting description of the mech: towering, green and black. Spikes. Red optics. After a long moment of silence, Anicon shuddered and reached for Prowl and the older mech closed his arms around him without thought, as though it were only natural to enfold such a wounded, wanting creature with strength and solidarity and offer him what he could.

Anicon was so very ardent, so very mild. Intelligent, sweet, supportive. There was a certain place in the Pit for those who hurt the helpless and Prowl couldn't help but feel himself one of that number with the small mech shaking against his chassis. Anicon fit… perfectly under his chin.

"I am certain I did not intend to harm you," he promised haltingly. Prowl cupped the younger mech's shoulder, not knowing what to say to fill such a void left _by someone else_ that still bore his name and appearance. He could only hope that _he_ did what was best. "I… apologize."

"D-don't apologize. It's over and you're here. I got you back. Just… h-hold me. Please."

Expression somber, he nodded and pressed the scientist close… and almost found his place. The scene, necessary and painful yet promising, was almost over; Prowl felt something clear in his heavy, tightly-bound Spark. They could move on, beyond his blank spots and his true past. Then he only gained one more burden as Anicon angled his face up against his black chassis and smiled at him in a shy, winning way.

"Yes?" he asked softly, arms still looped lightly around the other. His digits skimmed the mech's glossy, pretty plating, the motion pleasantly absent; comfortingly rote, as though he'd done it a thousand times before with the little mech in his arms. His new world and all of the variables almost aligned in his wounded Spark.

"After so long, it…" Anicon stumbled, crisp white facial plating turning pink. His servo tickled nervously at Prowl's grey flank and he looked away, dodgy and charming like always, nearly crumbling under the weight of his own nerves. "I was hoping you c-could… kiss me, Prowl?"

Prowl was allowed a single split-klik of ordinary, pleasant surprise before the red weight slammed down.

It invaded him in a single scorching pulse; paralyzed him down to his last humming neural unit. The ice wall of before, instead of blocking his motor functions, sealed them off and _punched in_ and gouged at his defenseless tensors to spite his frozen, fizzling processor. His arms rose of their own accord, disorientation hitting him like a killing blow: Prowl jerked once and, the promise of pain shadowing every forced action, reached forward, tilted Anicon's serene face up, pressed his stiff mouth in the proper place, then drew back for a moment before the malicious, buzzing pressure vacated his processor.

The klik it was over, he crashed to his knees in front of the other mech, little more than a shivering shell with his insides frozen dry.

"P-prowl, what—"

Panicking at the noise, the ninjabot reached up and clutched at Anicon's slender legs, pressing his horns to his thighs, absolutely wretched. An old ache, like being suspended on a table and seared at the wrists, burned through his poisoned neural net. Now, processor racing hysterically, he knew what had caused him to stop so suddenly when he first rebooted and tried to escape: Anicon's simple command.

"Oh Primus, what--what's wr—"

"Please," he gasped, pushing the words and the signals out of him like he couldn't draw electrical breath to move, even as the hateful coding noose loosened. His systems hitched painfully, choking with fear and the sudden takeover. "Please, if you value me or pity me in the smallest of senses, never speak so again."

The only sound in the room was pistons clicking slower and slower and the panicked hiss of his vents.

"Do not… take my free will."

Anicon, horror clear on his face as he gazed down at Prowl's anguished, frightened expression, teetered ponderously for a klik more before falling to his own knees and clutching the shuddering ninjabot close.

"I'm sorry, I'm s-so sorry Prowl: I won't, I d-didn't—I'm so ashamed."

He whimpered and pleaded with the other mech, black-on-white metal squeaking from his hysterical force as he tried to crush the event out of the two of them—especially the memory of Prowl's voice when he spoke.

It was almost like he was… begging a stranger not to hurt him.

* * *

After a simple programming content scan, they discovered what the medibots had missed: Direct Command software. Upon registering him into Anicon's care, the circuit grunts had installed a first-pass command system into Prowl with Anicon's vocals registered as the command source. His name and the request, so stated with the proper pause, had been recognized as a direct order. His body complied to his master's will.

Prowl, sitting blankly in front of Anicon while it was explained to him in quivering half-sentences, had been purchased from a slave circuit.


	41. Closer

A/N: Ho'boy. I have way too much fun with Ani's antennae XD SAD PUPPY LOOK.

So, rest assured, I will never, ever write (torture you with) smut for Anicon and Prowl. It would make my brain spatter the sides of my skull. The end. Also, Ani is most certainly an uber-virgin but I'm going with clean fanon energy-based Cybertonian intimacy here, so there's no way to be like 'WTF, we've never banged before!'

…Now that I've scared the piss/hydraulic fluid out of you and made you doubt me as an author, plzread :D Thank you so much for your continued support and reviews and all that jazz, you know I'm still workin' for you!

Mucho thanks to Christy for beta'ing these chapters for me and to everyone who offered their services :3

* * *

Closer

* * *

Direct Command software. A callous derivative of the slavery programming left over from their unthinkable racial roots, all 'bots knew, illegal on any level of Cybertronian law: the most intolerable breech of sentient rights and now, a meticulous body-wide coding vice slithering in the dark places between Prowl's vital wiring. Waiting.

It was too much to handle; far too much, even for one fully aware of who they are.

The explanation was fragmented and interspersed with Anicon's breathy pleas _to please understand_, but he could not. Besides that, Prowl's reaction was the best that anyone could have hoped for: a few kliks of blank staring, a stymied shake of his head, and, finally, a request to be alone. Anicon, nearly inconsolable, didn't want to leave him to his own dark, mangled thoughts, but relented when the bike simply sat in front of him, frozen, visor buzzing an unfocused, dead grey-blue.

The next solar-cycle, Prowl emerged from his quarters with a down-turned face and Anicon wasted no time out of his company. He doubled his efforts at distraction, trying (with small smiles and bracing touches and attentive silences) to flush the _idea_ of the Direct Command software out of his dear former lover, but Prowl could feel it waiting beneath his coding, like a servo to the back of his wire-thick neck. He felt it even more so than the concrete but evidence-bare fact of… where he had come from.

Anicon, the timid, now distraught scientist, had purchased him from a slavery circuit. It was dark, he was told, and terrifying. Someplace no 'bot would come out of undamaged. He had seen horrible things, surely. Things he wouldn't want to talk about.

It was disturbing, to be certain. Prowl finally found the possible source of the foggy recharge shivers he had been experiencing--even the arrested state of his Spark. He should have been horrified, ripping through his banks for any shred of pain or fear that he could use to verify the torture that was so very real to the shuddering white 'bot before him, but like everything in his new life, it was so surreal that it almost failed to be relevant. It simply didn't… connect.

The young mech didn't know what to _feel_; what conclusions to draw, when something so staggeringly traumatic had made no impact on him besides a few hushed yet not-unpleasant stirrings at his abstract memory banks. Mere tickles for what should have been a scraping, bleeding gouge into his life. He—Prowl, the idea; Prowl, the crushed collection of reserved personality programming and Autobot coding—was nebulous, floating. A blundering, hollow derivative of one 'bot's memories and trust, existence simultaneously undermined and affirmed in every moment.

But the DC software… that was _physical_.

In the plainest of terms, Anicon was his master. Now that the revelation had been forced upon them by the pitiless hand of illegal impulse-override technology, their relationship came under a quick vice: stunned by his horrible power, the young scientist took great pains to censor himself and dissected each sentence for a possible 'order'. Far from assuring Prowl of the other's care, the conspicuous, fumbling effort murdered all casual interactions and only made the ninjabot more aware of the malignant presence inside him.

Even then, because Anicon was so enthusiastic and natural and _everpresent_, there had been a few slips. It was surprising that it hadn't happened before then, truly, but Anicon got carried away or absent-minded and said things (innocent, small things) and that breathless twinge happened in the tender circuitry at the back of Prowl's exposed neck; five cycles and a purple-tinted visor later, he was pushing his way out of Anicon's arms, aching and angry at his body and—perhaps—the 'bot himself.

Each time, no matter how innocuous the order… gaseous red paralysis and suffocation froze his smoldering Spark, his heavy, stiff limbs moving of their own spitefully creaking accord as his processor _voided_ in fear.

_Prowl, wait._

_Would you, um, h-hand that to me, Prowl?_

_Scoot over, Prowl._

It was… foolish, he knew, to hate someone who had gone to such lengths to rescue him—who paid, even as he didn't want to think about it, a horrific amount to free him from such a life—but when the other's mild vocals echoed in his audio receptors and solidified into a breathing, pressing force, hatred was his only defense against despair. When your body is no longer your own and your memories have fled, what other defense is there?

Prowl, in an uncomfortably quiet moment down in the blue-lit lab, had asked how much. Anicon didn't want to say. The way the younger bot winced away from the question and covered his mouth and did his stuttering best to assure Prowl that it wasn't a problem, that it didn't _matter_. It only aggravated him. Scattered to the point of hysteria, trapped under his repaired black plating, he pressed further, needing, perhaps, a concrete guesstimate of his worth. Finally, Anicon hastily shelved a clunky piece of equipment and leaned against an incubation rack with his round face turned toward the ground.

"F-five… hundred thousand."

Prowl dropped the spade he was holding, teal visor flaring.

"You're w-worth it, Prowl. I just… I needed you safe and you're worth it," Anicon insisted breathlessly, straightening and reaching for him. He retracted the gesture when Prowl turned away with a fiercely conflicted expression, instead wilting and lacing his servos together, whispering, "I didn't even… I can't even think about regretting it. I know—I _know_ you would have paid the same f-for me."

"How did I… come to be there?" Prowl dared at length, glaring blindly at a collection of blooming red organisms, rustling quietly in their pots. It was the question he had avoided since he heard and absorbed and processed the haunting fact, placed like a bomb into the blue silence of the lab.

"I d-don't know," Anicon answered, turning to his table again and sending something clattering over the metal surface, vocals tight. "You've been--I don't know what h-happened after you… um, left. Tinus wasn't aware, but I p-paid some of his employees to locate you if they could—they're intelligence officers, v-very well-connected and exposed to all territories--and one of them told me where you were. He… I haven't heard from him since, but I found you. In that place. Couldn't leave you. It was… t-terrible. Can't you see how I couldn't leave you there?"

In every artificial sense—the way of someone hearing a _story_ and sympathizing with the distant pastel-washed characters--he could. But the proof?

Prowl hid his face in his servo and vented some air, quick and sharp, wondering when reality was going to start feeling… real. The curious suspension he found himself in was maddening and he knew very few things with crisp certainty: his world was so out of tune and out of control, he was nearly questioning the very laws of physics. He turned when something tentatively brushed his fairing and found Anicon half-stooped before him with new dirt caking his servos, blue optics wide.

"But when I said you were s-safe—when I told you no one was going to hurt you, I… I meant it. I really did. I'm glad you can't… remember it, because it's as good as gone. It doesn't _matter_, because you're here now. We'll get that s-s-software out of you and your Spark will go b-back to normal and then everything will… be okay."

Carefully, coaxing the frightened ninjabot back to ground-level with his utter ardency and Spark-bright goodwill, Anicon placed his dirty digits on the other's forearms. He tilted his head, antennae drooping with a miserable electronic tone, and tried to smile.

"W-won't it?"

Anicon alone knew the burden of what he had gone through and paid such a drastic sum to free him. Shaken anew with such knowledge—the silent _debt_, gorging itself on circumstance and trust, assumptions and six-digit figures--Prowl couldn't hate Anicon for his innocent slips, especially when the Elite shivered helplessly in his arms and he was engulfed by the genuine anguish from the other's kind Spark. It was not his fault.

Things became easier. How could it not, with someone so concerned with his wellbeing? The endeavor to heal himself was not taken in solitude and that alone meant more than he suspected. Recovery, however, was a piecemeal process.

At first, desperate to _move forward_, he sought distractions: far too familiar with the compound by this point, Prowl expanded his territory to the curious purple-green forest outside. Exulting in the crisp rearrangement of parts and the resulting rush, he transformed for the first time in ages and plowed forward with a markedly tense rubber squeak, disappearing into the foliage for megacycles on end; simply trying to… think without attempting to remember.

The forest was beautiful.

The enfolding presence of such redolent, vibrant life unleashed a stirring in his Spark, the like of which he had never felt before. Some sort of organic whimsy captured him with magnificent, unquestionable immediacy, leading him to drift close to small, ludicrously detailed organisms he hardly dared touch, yet they survived his careful attentions time and again. In the flourishing alien ecosystem, he found resiliency and a fount of surprise, revealed by little more than quiet, motionless observation: pollen-dusted bulbs filled with liquid, fostering a symbiotic relationship between the plant and the ground dwellers who carried the yellow, downy seed elsewhere after feeding; an acrobatic and suicidal mating competition between two aerial creatures, each striving to display the extent of their physical mastery for the waiting breeder by plowing headfirst towards tree trunks and veering away at the last moment; a precise mathematical rhombus pattern (Prowl's thinned visor blinked with rapid green and blue scanning squares, reverently recording angles and affirming ratios in muted beeps) etched on the silvery surface of a plant by invisible squirming 'chromosomes' and nothing more.

The levels of organization, the designs, the myriad functions and beautiful forms… it was beyond fascinating. Megacycles and megacycles passed and still Prowl had to return, less and less to take his processor off of what he was and what he was not and more to simply _watch_. He truly began to understand why Anicon had chosen this planet so far from Cybertron; why these organisms were his living passion, even if all of it was tied into a Ministry of Science project he was forbidden to speak of.

After the first few ventures, Anicon joined him, at first driving silently by his side as nothing more than a comforting presence; knowing the bike wanted to be alone, but unable to truly grant him that for fear of unpredictable behavior. Prowl understood, in some small part. Whatever the case, talk returned to them in small doses while brush and rich dirt passed beneath the ninjabot's wheels, feeding his need to remain in motion and, in whatever small way he could, stay self-decided and capable. They spoke of small, harmless things, such as the forest around them, and slowly, Prowl calmed down and settled in again.

The drives became a somewhat daily routine and every so often, perhaps after a sharp turn into soft brush, the conversation escalated into teasing engine growls, flurries of dislodged foliage and the distinct rush of competition. When putting an electric roar behind his speed as exotic green whipped by his warm fairings, Prowl was actually happy: happy like he was when carefully folding the younger mech into the lotus position, swatting his shoulder when he snickered at the servo on his thigh; happy like he was down in Anicon's lab, doing menial work that the other protested, like refilling the feeding tubes and recording heights. All of that was calming, soothing—but this? This was slightly invigorating.

One solar-cycle, following the unpredictable flare of his Spark, Prowl singled out a clear path and tore ahead in utter sincerity (no push-over capitulation, no playfully contrite ease down) and, laughing in surprise, tiny trim-wheeled Anicon sped after. The real race was on.

It was fantastic, going as fast as he could go. Energon tingled in his tubing, a satisfying pink sizzle radiating from his core as he simply _burned it up_ with the spin of his thick wheels. He had to drop behind or take difficult paths to let Anicon catch up, but they roared back and forth for a good megacycle before Anicon dipped back and he heard the other shout something from behind a wall of trees: most likely, from the gasp, a version of uncle. Engine puttering as deviously as his hot-running processor, the bike swerved and hid himself behind a tangle of green; Anicon buzzed by a bare klik later, trundling forward on tired tires until he realized the forest had gone quiet, bare of any mirroring motor-noise. Sitting uncertainly for a moment in alt-mode, he transformed with a fittingly polite noise and stood, peering around into the trees with his optics glowing brilliant blue.

It was small work to sneak up behind him and even smaller (if satisfying) work to play with him. Prowl spooked him for a klik or two, stooping out of sight and blowing race-warmed air onto his sensitive flanks until he eeped and jumped away, assuming a very, very poor imitation of the Iron Fist and glaring around with a ferocious pout. Beyond amused, Prowl straightened and gave himself away with a rare deep chuckle, but the response was no less dramatic than if he had shouted with intent to scare. Anicon twirled and made a shrill noise, which he could have easily dealt with. He wasn't, however, expecting his young student to strike out with his recently acquired skills, so he was unable to keep the 'bot from tripping himself to death in the process.

"Hi-_yah_!"

Accompanied by a rather panicked battle-cry, Anicon's fist snapped out and Prowl instinctively swiveled to the side, but the slapdash momentum conquered the open-mouthed scientist and even Prowl's quick arm slithering around his side wasn't enough to keep him upright. Caught on the tips of his stylish pedes, Prowl became a causality of gravity and Anicon's horrible lack of balance: the scientist's servo fastened on his wrist, yanking in a panic, and his equilibrium chip shrieked surrender. Crying out in highs and lows, they hit the ground with a dull boom, cushioned by the undergrowth.

The fall placed them nearly optic-to-optic, black and white limbs tangled and wheels dusted with soil. The first thing Prowl became aware of was… a stick, one of many, lodged quite painfully in his leg armor. Squirming disconcertedly with Anicon sprawled beneath him and a little to the side, he reached down and plucked it out and refreshed his optics somewhat stupidly. Antennae twanging, Anicon ducked his head and started chuckling nervously, bursting into a full-fledged laugh when Prowl lobbed the stick away and added his own gentle scolding noise, communicating his new, very serious disapproval of undergrowth.

They quieted after a moment, settling down after the chase, and their attention drifted inward. Prowl shifted to recline on his arm and Anicon lay curled next to him, digits sliding absentmindedly along his forearm; the Elite's expression was rich with thanks and adoration while Prowl did little more than fondly look over his companion and let out the last bit of race-air he had been holding, finally _relaxing_. The dense forest rustled around them, recovering from the unwelcome disruption of their fall. Once the pleasant moment had spent itself, Prowl smiled absently and moved to heave himself to his pedes again—but before he could truly tense up, Anicon's servo slid from his wrist up his arm, closing tentatively on his gold-lined shoulder plating.

Prowl looked down in what should not, for any normal 'bot, have been surprise. In a few crackling-crunching kliks, the scientist's dreamy look had burned away, replaced by an urgent, somewhat frightened expression that only made sense when Anicon carefully raised himself from the forest floor and, all in a rush, leaned up and pressed his mouth to Prowl's. His grip tightened, mirroring Prowl's suddenly knotted substructure; after parting, the younger mech shuddered softly when the ninjabot's free servo quested curiously over the side of his face and the blue-detailed base of his antennae. Off-lining his optics, swayed by a heady new sensation coursing like pulsing syrup in his tight-knit circuitry, Prowl explored the compact's soft jawline and his servos wandered along his dainty white exostructure, a hushed wonder suffusing every scrape of waxed plating.

When the timid mech drew a single digit over his vibrating black chamber-plating, however, something within him took over to rival a clenching fist; engine spiking, hot air flowing from under his plating, Prowl's visor narrowed to an almost predatory sliver and he pressed gentle Anicon into the green ground, their contrasting bodies intertwining toe to tip.

* * *

Prowl jerked as he rebooted, bright blue consciousness punching through his taut wiring and crowding his wounded center, whole body stiffening as a haggard, nearly nauseated confusion flooded his insides. His engine blindly leapt to life, whining and quieting the wildlife; Anicon lay splayed at his side, sweet face slack and half obscured by green. After a slow, shifting moment, Prowl sat up and vented a groaning bit of air that seemed to push straight from his fretting Spark, digits already pressing at his cooling Sparkchamber. Slowly, carefully, he gathered himself like so many discarded pieces.

It was… new, but not in the most obvious of senses.

He had desired it. Perhaps not until that moment, but it was a consensual act and he had enjoyed it. It… occurred, and easily at that: something fast and sure inside of him had led him to the act, much like his Art. Intimacy was not new, certainly, so there was only one problem with the clammy disorientation currently swamping his flickering circuitry.

Thus sparked by the other's unsure touches, his body had leapt up in a steaming, scalding furor, but when it came time for the clash… the rhythm didn't mesh. It was that _rhythm_ again, those abstract currents running through his wiring, telling him with growing insistency that what he felt, what his Spark wanted, simply didn't sync up with the flowery, easy-going life of leisure he now lived in. Now, rearing up with a vengeance from the black of overload, it gifted him with a sort of sizzling body-memory that told him in the most explicit, cold-water terms that this was… not what he was _used_ to.

Strange as it was when enfolded in lamentable vagueness everywhere else, the shy, soft act provoked a kind of clarity he had never experienced before. It wasn't just a notable disparity between what he received and what he wanted: for one brief klik, Prowl had gripping physical memories of another kind of intimacy, infinitely more scraping and hard-handed, underscored with gravelly chuckles and a feeling of dark, thrumming abandon. The intensity of it (a vice on electricity-gorged wires, prompting tingling physical hallucinations that made him heat up all over again) made his fans skip, battered Spark contracting to an even unhealthier knot of light.

He didn't understand. Still awash with the new experience, his body instantly craved something he had never had before—something, wherever it came from, that Anicon simply wasn't nor had ever been. No, his Spark gulped for warm air after the crisp, foreign pulse of energy from the other's dazzling center: infringing, clashing, over-eager and stubbed by differing frequencies. It might have been his compromised Spark crying out in shock, but the novelty of it stunned him.

It was almost as though he had… never felt the other's Spark before, but that was impossible—not after a rich century of coexistence. The problem had to lie with himself. His seared memory banks, so vulnerable to misconceptions. His fragmentations. Otherwise…

It was hard to regulate his worried systems (or his baffled processor) and find the correct facial expression when Anicon rebooted with a shudder and a gasp. Even if he had betrayed the confusion he was harboring, the other surely would not have noticed: blinded by the lingering rush of physicality, Anicon spared only a moment to look shyly in the opposite direction before pouncing closer and wrapping his arms around the ninjabot, nuzzling into him and heaving a grand, electricity-tinged sigh. Prowl had to smile slightly as the little scientist swooned uninhibitedly and nosed into his neck, and think that he liked the other a good deal.

Perhaps that was where it stopped: _liked_, even as Ani snickered helplessly and kissed his audio unit.

"Oh, that was—oh Primus, Prowl!"

"Better than times previous?" Prowl asked somewhat shyly, one servo on Ani's slender, sloping back, taking care to smile as the younger mech looked up at him with wide blue optics.

"Oh—um!" He gasped, then stuttered sweetly, "G-good as always. It's just… it's b-been so long. Primus, I've _missed_ you!"

The gleeful afterglow floundering continued, Prowl contributing every so often with a small smirk or a tickle of his digits on yet-hypersensitive antennae, but in short time Anicon was forced to realize he was relatively alone in his rolling exultations. Seeing Prowl stare beyond him into the forest, the little mech cringed and hid his face, facial plating a flustered shade of pink.

"Was it—" he irked out then stopped, rooting downwards with a hopeless noise and flicking at some fallen foliage. "I'm sorry. I haven't--I'm n-not very…"

Anicon's first and last resort, often preemptive or unnecessary, was apology. Prowl woke to the melancholy creature curled against him and shook his head, clearing his choked processor.

"No. I should apologize," he said softly, taking Anicon's chin and petting him perfunctorily; within kliks, his hidden optics drifted elsewhere. "I am… distracted."

"How so?" Anicon asked, resuming his cuddle with newly-brightened optics trained on him, as interested in talking to him as ever. Listening. Prowl frowned. The Elite was so very… understanding. Should he speak the truth?

"I know I am confused," he admitted at last, mouth twitching dully. "Whether such admissions make that confusion easier or harder to deal with, I am uncertain…"

Anicon watched him patiently, smiling anew to be curled so close to him. His lover. Prowl stopped, pausing to look into the canopy and refresh his vocals to prepare for the fact he had been thinking over, so restlessly, for the past two weeks. It was the only conclusion he could come to when amorphous, often hot feelings, throbbing straight from his wounded center and siphoned clumsily into his uncomprehending, inflexible circuitry, were all he had left. Finally, he dared to say it.

"I do not have much to draw from. What I do retain is hopelessly damaged. However, I… feel as though someone needs me. Someone I cannot remember."

Sighing, Prowl looked down in time to see a purely panicked expression snuffed into sharp-edged sincerity as Anicon shifted closer and took his servos, clutching them to his chest.

"I do. I need you," he whispered insistently, bowing to press both to his mouth in turn then gazing up again with minute whizzes and whirs from his intent optics, searching Prowl's long, elegant face for something he needed to continue. He didn't find it. Shaking his head, he stumbled on. "I n-need you with me, Prowl. What memory you have is… is very d-distorted, like you say, but it will sort itself out in time. And… it's me. I need you healthy and here with me."

"Yes," Prowl said after a long, long moment, slowly raising their linked servos to his own lips and watching relief send the other sagging against him with a soft core hum, free white arm twining tight once more. With Anicon lost in the glossy pillow of his chassis, soothed for the time being, Prowl looked up into the sun-yellow canopy again, visor thinning and bending uncertainly as he tried to chase and qualify the ghost sensations that ran hot and insistent underneath his belying black armor, every piece glossy and calm as the forest around him.

"Of course. Thank you."

* * *

"_Lockdown. … _Lockdown_."_

"_What."_

"_Fine greeting."_

"_M'busy, gal."_

"_You look horrid. What is going on? I haven't spoken with you for two weeks and _not_ for lack of trying."_

"_Bad timing. Not my problem."_

"_When you disable your transmitter for megacycles at a time, I would say it is. But… no. Never mind. How have you… been?"_

_Silence._

"_Don't make me do this, darling. I like to think you're a big mech and can function on your own."_

_Pause. Scrape._

"_Alright. When was the last time you refueled?"_

_A grunt._

"_What was your last job?"_

"_You done?"_

"_Lockdown, please—please _Primus_ say you've been hunting."_

"_I'll take a job when I need it."_

"_What else could you—"_

_Pause. Clank._

"_No. No, no. Oh Lord. Lockdown, he's… he's gone, love. You won't find him."_

"_That ain't for you to say."_

"_You're still searching for him. You've… been searching for him, all this time."_

_Pause._

"_He's still out there. Know he is. S'gotta be."_

_"That's—Lockdown! I'm… oh Lord. I'm not trying to change your mind, but you need to start working again. You know how unpredictable business can be and it's been months! Scratch refueling, how the Pit can you afford to pay for energon anymore?"_

_"M'pullin' it out of the kid's account. Figure, if he's online, he won't mind. If he's scrap like you say, he won't have a processor left to mind it."_

_"I never said h—darling. Please, listen to me. I understand you're in shock. You're mourning and it's only natural, but you can't do this to yourself. You can't end with him. You can't just… put everything on hold and just keep grasping for him when he's gone!"_

_"Do whatever the Pit I want to, Torque. No regrets."_

_"That's not an excuse. You don't even have the slightest idea where to start and he could be anywhere. The chances of you finding him are—I-I miss him. I'm… I know you do, too. He was such a sweet, brilliant mech. I know how important he was to you--"_

"_Shut up."_

"_Please. Please listen to me. I'm—I just--"_

"_Don't make me say it again, gal. Ain't exactly rational right now: would hate to see you on the wrong end of a blocked frequency just 'cos you can't follow orders. Prowl'd douse me. Now frag off. Gotta get some map-outs for the Berum quadrant."_

"_Lockdown!"_

"Now._"_

_Pause. Crackle._

"_I love you, Lockdown."_

"_Then go. F'you love me, you'll look for him."_

"_I… will. Alright. Call me if you… need anything."_

_Click._

* * *

Late that night, reclining against a silver tree in still, purple-saturated solitude, Prowl's digits worried at the lumpy scar around his chassis. His circuitry was a race-track, well-worn by his intense green scans and his heavy thoughts he reached time and time for _what he had felt_ only to have it dart out of hand in a stubborn retreat of his Spark. It couldn't be grasped, but it suffused every inch of him, confounding and uncomfortable for a heroic lover of a small, shy scientist. Finally, after megacycles of rigorous internal checks and careful touches, Prowl sat back with his visor bent at an anguished angle and drew a quiet breath, grip sliding from the scar to his chamber plating and settling there, heavy as the emerging truth.

There was another mech. There had to be.


	42. From Beneath

A/N: Two chapters this week, because part of me wants to get this simpering tomfoolery over with as fast as possible :[

Ani, you don't realize you purchased a tiger when you wanted a house cat. PROWL GON' EAT YO AFT. And we're gonna watch. Then rewind and watch again. Yep.

Also, the adorable little twit is mine. So... I feel more tender towards him than I should, knowing what's to come. One important thing about Anicon, though, is that he's not precisely manipulative: his ACTIONS are, quite, but that's only because he has no filter. He's not capable of scheming because he has _no foresight_, he just kinda... emotionally vomits on everything; he's just not socialized and has been shut in his lab his entire function, courtesy of Tinus. Everything he does is utterly sincere and he can't _lie_ (just tell wishful stories for the greater good), which is what makes it disgusting sometimes (alltimes)! He's just TRYING HIS BEST. So... Yeah.

Not telling you to take it easier on him, I just want you to know that he's seriously... ill-equipped for life. XD Poor little booger. 'Till next week!

* * *

From Beneath

* * *

The purple-green belt of forest was the only place they could truly be alone.

After a fair number of bland, brusque hallway encounters, Prowl realized that Tinus was actually fairly apathetic towards him, seeming to judge him solely on the enjoyment his ward took from him. It was strange to be so disregarded, but the ninjabot could only assume the intelligence officer had far more important things to worry about than his own expensive return from blackmail-induced Decepticon dalliance. The only time Tinus ever raised protest was when Ani began to shirk his official duties to be with the bike, so it was often uncomfortable to be in the compound when Anicon wished to… be physical or affectionate in any way. To avoid his warder's exacting blue stares in the common room, the fledgling Elite had taken to staying in Prowl's room at night or coaxing him into his; the ninjabot had rebooted more than once to a shy servo on his chamber plating and the dimmed, hopeful halo of blue optics, all accented by warm, wanting air.

There was also a startling purchase that required a bit of distance between warder and ward: Anicon, ever the doting companion, had modifications fashioned personally for his elegant body-guard, all of an exotic black gold-trimmed flair. Shoulder plates, thigh guards, a helmet with curving golden horns. They were presented to him with a hopeful, proud little grin and a quiver of antennae.

"They are… lovely," Prowl said slowly once he had donned them in careful scrapes and clicks, focused only on moving in the things: though lightweight, they were crafted of semi-decorative material and they pinched in odd places. Not armor, he knew: ornaments. He would have to learn how to walk properly in them. When Anicon looked at him questioningly (rather, expectantly, round face glowing), as though wondering why he was squeaking around in the things and testing the articulacy of his joints, he murmured reluctantly, "A tad obstructive."

"Oh." It was the wrong thing to say. Anicon buckled at the knees and looked away, hurt radiating off of him. He bit his digit. "You can just… take them off, then. It d-doesn't matter."

"No," Prowl assured him, vocals as firm as the hand he stilled the younger mech with. He bent down slightly, looking into the other's wide optics and smiling gently. The scientist's little body sprang back upright, face brightening. "Thank you."

For solar-cycles after he equipped them, the scientist watched him with something short of hero-worship, but such extravagant purchases obviously didn't settle well with his strict, sensible guardian, so more often than not they took off to avoid his stern optic, skittering off like Sparklings ducking a scolding. Prowl felt especially odd _existing_ in the somewhat gaudy shell when Tinus saw him alone: he instantly felt as though the curt, appraising swivel of the older mech's optics was his personal fault, so he was quite grateful to get away from the compound and back into the forest.

Their organic wanderings continued, conversation material passing above their heads and pedes alike in a never-ending stream of color and motion. Exertion, however, was his main solace and one solar-cycle, to chase the nigh-uncomfortable pink itch of full energy cells, Prowl began a game. He was a reserved mech, to be certain, but his level of playfulness seemed to suit shy Anicon whenever it emerged: the mech was willing to go along with anything he devised so long as it found him smiling at the end.

When Anicon transformed and took off into the greenery, kicking up dust beneath his wheels in expectation of an immediate (and sadly shallow) chase, Prowl took an alternate route, immersing himself in the vibrantly scented wilderness. Thus camouflaged and estranged from the scientist by cycles of silence, he stalked the soon-disoriented Anicon for a good forty cycles, flitting from tree to tree and purposefully snapping (brittle, soon-to-fall) branches to goad the mech, who whipped this way and that with his arms bundled tightly around his slender middle. Anicon played the part of prey magnificently, laughing just nervously enough to allow a smile, calling his name every so often… as though that alone would coax him out of the canopy. The scientist knew the woods were perfectly safe, but no plastic-coated predetermined knowledge could keep any mortal mech from shivering at the feeling of dark anticipation flashing from his peripheral vision.

Innocent in design, Prowl intended the outing as a pattern-breaker or an exercise. Quick, simple, pleasing. Games were always appreciated and he desperately needed a change of scenery from the fenced-in training pit he had constructed for his training sessions, alone and with Ani. With every muffled aspiration, every practiced movement to remain in the dark, thick quiet with the clean white tremble of naiveté locked in his field of vision, however, something awoke in him to rival a solar flare.

Shifting his black, slim weight onto a new branch with little more than a creak, Prowl settled into another rhythm: a darker one, but as natural and blessedly cohesive as the enfolding green itself.

When he could bear the tense feeling no longer, anticipation searing at his wire casings and control, he ended the chase by dropping to the forest floor and slipping out of the brush. Anicon, all wide blue optics, caught nothing more than a split-klik flash of his sculpted form before Prowl seized his arms and pinned him into a wide tree trunk. The scientist's fans skipped at the ringing impact, communicating his surprise, but he didn't say anything more—especially not when soothed by the ninjabot's quiet, malice-empty smile and warm plating. It was intense, yes, and an expression he'd never quite seen before, but it was also… Prowl.

Prowl, handsome and elegant and intellectual and gleaming with his armor. Perfect.

Intentions clear, the act progressed: kisses were traded, every tame, over-reverent motion only aggravating the ninjabot. Anicon, ever-gentle and bashful, traded only in tickles and whispers and tied the older mech in silk threads with every single encounter, sapping him of cherished momentum and leaving him itching at the digits with a still-buzzing Spark after the brief bout of darkness. Prowl didn't understand why, but it—Anicon and quiet, quivering sighs--simply wasn't _enough_, especially when exacerbated by the maddening desire for a quicker, firmer, more _challenging_ existence that training pits and forest conversations simply didn't quell. He had kept quiet for Anicon's sake and the fear of speaking too soon, but in these expectation-thick moments, the bike craved a certain kind of clean-cut ruthlessness; he pushed his way through slow solar-cycles, simultaneously craving more intimate contact and dreading the incredibly unique ghost-sensations it provoked… aching guilt and confusion foremost among them.

He was betraying someone. After two weeks of feeling the phantom mech at his core, he was nearly certain.

Whether it was Anicon or someone else, he did not know, but bewildering, subjective knowledge did nothing for the resentful pull of his true center. His needs. That rough, impatient energy knotted up inside of him, crouched beneath his Spark, and Prowl thoughtlessly drove his grip down to the other mech's upturned servos, pressing him flat against the stone-like wood and feeling every clear contraction of Anicon's tensors. Anicon laughed faintly into his audio units and, smoothly, obliviously, laced his digits through Prowl's hooked cream ones.

He swapped grips, scraping his way down the white mech's sides and pulling Anicon to him (a sweet sigh) as his digits dug forwards and down into the warm crevice between his aft and leg plating, dark wires parting difficultly under the assault. He pushed in. Vent valves catching, Anicon twitched against him and whimpered uncertainly, the instant contraction of his substructure pinching Prowl's invading digits. The scientist's energy field quailed, a pulse of anxiety (nonetheless _strong_ and real) crashing against Prowl's own hissing gold shell, feeding something that had burned desolate for weeks.

Finally, Prowl pushed him firmly against the tree, dense Spark roaring at his chamber, and angled one leg between the scientist's—then, exertion-drunk nuzzle leading him to the pale metal stretch by simple flow of static-thick energy, bit into Anicon's neck wiring with a snap of his jaw.

The young mech jerked, crying out short and sharp and tightening up to his last tensor. The upset caused many things in Prowl, the foremost of which was a quick and violent drenching of his off-color furnace. Coolant flooding him, he disengaged and stepped back, optics widening behind his visor when Anicon did the same, stumbling to the side with one white servo cupping his neck.

"Wh-what are you _doing_?" he demanded, staring at him in shock so complete it reverberated in Prowl's suddenly aching girders.

"I... I wasn't aware—I did not—" Prowl began faintly, then touched one servo to his visor, turning away.

For all his panic, he had nothing to say. It had simply happened, as the obvious culmination of a series of twisting, sensual gestures; as natural as the final step of a tai chi routine. It was… what he needed. The forest twittered calmly around them, offering no explanation for his sudden spurt of violence. Finally, conflicted feelings condensing into something close to despair, he murmured, "I apologize. It will not happen again."

Spark battered down to an unsteady lump of phosphorescence, Prowl shook his head and began to walk away, back to his training pit and another featureless white afternoon. Gasping, Anicon suddenly stumbled after him, freeing his servo from his neck only to grip at Prowl's arm, tugging him to a halt.

"No, no—wait. It's… it's okay. If you," he nearly choked, then refreshed his vocals, so meekly. Hesitant. "If you like that, it's fine. You can."

But Anicon was looking at him so _fearfully_, the sharp emotion dulled only by an undercurrent of immortal hope so thick it was nauseating (only continuing a trend that had been long in function, Anicon was so horribly _indefectible_), that Prowl was forced out of any semblance of a quiet, submissive exit. Pricked, he glared at the younger mech.

"Absolutely_ not_," he snapped. He unpeeled the scientist's servo from his arm, turning Anicon to face him. "You cannot… simply agree to something if you do not appreciate it. I have never intended to force any facet of myself upon you: do not remove my choice in the matter. You are your own being, Anicon. Have the courage to stand up and do not bow so thoughtlessly!"

It was murdering him, on some small and constant scale, to have to _hold back_; to bring his vocals to such an aggravated level while maintaining prickling physical stillness if just to keep Anicon _listening_ and not cringing away from the slightest sign of displeasure in him, all sad excuses and promises. Prowl was literally incapable of expressing a clean discontented emotion without garnering some sort of obsequious retreat--and the agony wasn't simply mental. Somewhere, somehow, his body remembered a time where physicality was a celebration and two sides fought, salty with their own urgent, glowing desires, and there was tension but no hatred. His Spark remembered—and wanted—far, far more in a crunching, grinding sense. A vent for the dark, sudden impulses he had been fighting for weeks.

Impulses which, with as closely as Tinus watched him through the shutters, he was certain had not gone unnoticed.

"But I don't—it d-doesn't matter, really. I'll do a-anything you like. I only want you to be happy," Anicon whispered, reaching for him again. Prowl took him at the wrist and turned it aside, glower only intensifying.

"You cannot have everything you believe you desire without making sacrifices," Prowl answered darkly, giving the young mech a singular sizzling look before turning away and striding out of the clearing. "Not all sacrifices are honorable."

Once Prowl was out of sight with a resentful rubber squeal, Anicon caught his breath with a shaking, miserable noise and dropped to the dry ground, pressing his delicate servos to his face and mourning both the empty drive home and a fantasy too complex to truly be satisfied by one mortal 'bot.

* * *

"—_ound good? I'll even get you a new signal-specific radar on the house: I know you're in the market for one and no 'bot should make a move 'till he knows who's around him and what side they're batting for!"_

_Silence. Creak. Scrape._

"_C-come on, heh, big guy. Talk to me. Give me something. I—loosen up, you know how I run. It was… business, you know it was business. That's all I do: business! I was doing you a _favor_, LD, and you know I don't do those. Against my religion, that was, and only for my favorite customer on this side of the galaxy! I sure as Pit… didn't, ah, didn't have to!"_

"_Yer right. Y'didn't."_

_Silence. Scrape._

"_Lockdown. I—frag it, I _didn't take_ the Autobot."_

"_Didn't say you did, Swindle."_

"_Then wh—no, no, Lockdown, ho—"_

_Click._


	43. Solution

A/N: I know. I know. I KNOW. It will be over soon, promise: two more chapters, both fairly epic.

Also, just try and think about it from Anicon's point of view, regardless of his EFFIN' IMPOSSIBLE imagination, and his actions become a liiiiiittle less insane and obsessive D: He just… loves Prowl. It's just a shame he had this opportunity to be so selfish, otherwise he would've been a fine, cute little darling without any opportunity to hurt anyone. Maw.

OH TINUS. You're a piece of work. Is it any wonder Ani turned out the way he did?

* * *

Solution

* * *

Fine figure lacerated by the white lines of the blinds, the sun-blotted shadow slid forward and raised an arm to the sky; he curled and uncurled, stretching. Shifting. Settling. Tinus watched from the compound's cool interior, flat face pensive.

That solar-cycle the same as any other solar-cycle, the young cyberninja conducted his routine morning practice in his pit, new light glancing off his gaudy mods and starbursting on the lacquered gold. He darted back and forth with a pole, swiveling and slashing in the sand-rimmed confine; Tinus could almost hear the gears whirring and whining cleanly, only to halt with a click neither forced nor gentle. It was a mastery of mechanics that tensors and equilibrium chips alone could not produce. Firm, controlled, practiced, and a pleasure to look at for simple rhythm and aesthetics.

Or, at least it had been.

The Elite was rarely at the compound, true, but his recent relief from intensive business had granted him plenty of time to actually settle down, consider and observe their new… houseguest. Every morning it had been the same slow dance, but lately, the reverent pauses between rote routines had been contracting as though chased by a flame at either end, hedged in by movements almost sloppy in their urgency. There was something… different stewing underneath the young mech's plating, itching at his tensors; poisoning his somewhat unnerving calm and causing the ninjabot to duck his long face the slightest bit when caught passing through the hallway with the older mech.

Tinus, sitting back in his low chair with a datapad and observing the bike's activities with a flat expression, looked up to see Anicon wander into the common room with a preoccupied gait. He made a noise; the little mech stopped and scuffed his pedes, blue optics immediately flickering towards the liquid shadow of his 'lover'. His Guardian nodded to him after a moment, then, to save Anicon the trouble of diverting his bumbling thoughts, motioned to the window with his stylus.

"Your bodyguard has been growing a little more… enthusiastic with his training lately."

Prowl, springing from a compact crouch like a splash of sharp black paint, reared into the air and hacked, double-fisted, into a standing dummy constructed of fibrous stuff. He set to mauling it with a ferocious silence and a hot blue sliver for a visor, finally punching his fist into the nebulous middle of it and ripping out at the same moment (same _movement_, following a ravenous flex of his body) he whipped off its head. It hit the ground with a mild, unheard poof of hay.

Tinus tapped his stylus absently, well aware of his Ward's breathless flinch.

"He spends the entire morning fastidiously erecting those little dolls only to maul them to pieces," he commented curiously, blocky head tilting. "It seems pointless—but then again, so does all that humming."

"He has a n-name, sir. It's Prowl," Anicon said stiffly, then melted into his classic anxiety, fairly wringing his fragile servos and watching the shadow flit around outside as though he could read something from it. Fretting. "And he's just, um, r-restless. He's used to much more, even if he… doesn't remember it."

He turned away and rubbed the side of his neck, worrying at a faint half-moon roughness in his wiring Tinus had never quite noticed before. A moment passed.

"Anicon."

Something in his tone made the young mech look back with wide optics, already feeling a heavy weight, swollen with nearly four months of tension, creak above his dainty white-plated shoulders. Tinus sighed tiredly.

"I realize that you believe you are happy. But have you ever considered the option that he may be deceiving you just as you are deceiving him?"

"He wouldn't do that. N-never. You saw the memory core scans and Prowl is… honest, so honest," he insisted tenderly, servos drifting up to link over his doubtlessly misty Sparkchamber. He paused to soak in the distant shadow again before straightening with a woof of his engine and clenched fists. "And I'm not d-deceiving him! I'm… I'm giving him a new life."

"Gift-wrapped, with fabricated details," Tinus added dryly, tired storm-grey optics locked on his insubstantial Ward.

"And what is the alternative, Tinus? That I tell him the truth?" Anicon snapped, vocals spiraling higher. "Th-that he was a prisoner! Trapped with a monster of a mech who _sold him_ into slavery when he got through with him!?"

The content, not the viciousness, earned him a pause. Several of Tinus' logic components beeped and chirped briefly.

"You have proof of this?"

"I have all the proof I n-need! Prowl left me and then shows up on some planet in the corner of nowhere some half-century later, cuffed to a t-table and it was all that bounty hunter's fault! There's no other reason. That mech is—is evil, you didn't meet him!" he fairly wailed, turning to pace in an ill-contained panic, antennae at half-mast as he gestured wildly. "He was… terrifying and I know he was keeping Prowl there by force. He almost told me. Th-they had a contract and Prowl couldn't leave or else he would _do_ something—something evil!"

Tinus, unaffected by his Ward's detailed outpouring of grief and anxiety, looked at him appraisingly, reminding himself and Anicon of where the recordless ninjabot had been 'found': a dwelling on a far-off planet, whose organic inhabitants had originally purchased the bike model as a worker. In exchange for anonymity and a horrible amount of money, Anicon bought the mech into safety. That was the story, regrettable as it was. It was all Tinus knew, really, and all he needed to—or so his Ward thought. Tinus pushed some air from his vents and looked out the window again, refreshing his small slanted optics.

"Terrifying… and yet he delivered you without a scratch."

How the old mech wished he had sent a Guard convoy to pick Anicon up--especially as the highly respected scientist flew into a tizzy again, shaking his head violently and darting towards his caretaker with his servos outstretched.

"Only b-because Prowl was there to protect me! Only because there was money involved. He would be just the type to know about the b-black market and all those horrible places. That Sparkless D-decepticon sold Prowl when he tired of him—p-probably when Prowl wouldn't do what he wanted anymore!"

Consumed as he was by his lover's forgotten grief, unreal in any sense of the word, Anicon was at least observant enough to notice his Guardian's dwindling patience: only exacerbated, surely, by the insolent implications that he would delegate his Ward's long-ago rescue to a homicidal Decepticon. Anicon stifled the stung, preparatory whirr of the old mech's vocals by moving to the window, twining his digits together.

"Prowl was abused on that ship, I _know_ it, and I know why. He wasn't… suited for that k-kind of existence, Tinus; he's so gentle, really, and I bet it h-hurt him to have to do some of those things," he mumbled and turned around, bowing his head and leaning against the wall. "I j-just want to… give him a life he will enjoy. I want to make him happy."

Tinus waited. Anicon bit a digit, visual sensors turned inwards.

"I want to get rid of that d-damned scar around his chassis and make him whole again."

The elder Elite leaned back again and rearranged his datapad, calling up an Intelligence update (infringement investigation, third sector) with a few curt taps of his stylus.

"A noble endeavor. It seems to be working well," he commented, rearranging his screen and beginning to type a response to a coworker's query. "After all, I see you two bickering more often than not."

"I do not appreciate your sarcasm, Tinus," Anicon said coldly, optics flaring fiercely for a moment as he dared to glare down his occupied Guardian. "I have waited for this for t-too long to regret it."

"I am not questioning the satisfaction you are getting out of him," Tinus allowed dully, pausing to finish the message and put the pad away next to his chair with a haggard speed. He looked up at the compact and sighed. "I'm saying, there is cause to worry: if this aggressiveness continues…"

"No. It will g-go away," Anicon insisted thickly, hugging his own shoulders and once more staring helplessly out the window. "He just needs time to get used to this. He just needs me."

Finally pushed beyond his limits, Tinus stood up with a deep clang, causing the little mech to jerk around. Rarely did he speak harshly to his ward. Rarely had he needed to, since the mech's protoforming, but his maudlin tone and increased short-sightedness (_obsession_, as it were, immature and swooning) were beginning to grate on his image of what he thought a considerably accomplished mech in a significantly accomplished Elite family unit. It was eating into his reputation and stunting his work: a noxious decay rooted in a single dubious and functionally _useless_ complication. That mech.

One role of the Guardian was to divert their Wards from painful, dead-end paths, regardless of their personal whimperings. He glared at the young mech, optics flaring.

"Allow me to rephrase that. Regardless of your flights of fancy, I don't agree with giving a probable Autobot traitor who dealt in piracy and illegal activities free reign in my realm and with my Ward, his every escalating action mitigated by a besotted fool who would excuse anything less than a fist through his chamber for simple conversation and a shameful amount of interfacing."

Anicon, had he been holding anything, would have dropped it; as it was, the room itself was saturated with the silence that always spread and suffocated after a dropped truth. Anicon looked at his Guardian with piteously wide optics, horrified embarrassment and, within a muster of nanokliks, timorous anger competing for his panicked attention. Struck still by what would have been a killing blow for a mech twice as collected as himself, the young scientist quailed and crumbled on some vital, essential scale, antennae nearly slicked to his white helm… but still attempted to speak.

It was hard, the elder supposed, to see his precious, flawless (or tragically flawed) mech reduced to such terms and it was obvious that the scientist was going to protest that Prowl would never hurt him, _never_. Tinus had no such confidence. He had never met Prowl before, never spiraled into dumb love on a garden planet and stewed that romance for half a century in his imaginatively glitched processor, and so had no deep, intuitive bond to wager from. The possibility that the viciously skilled mech with the blank visor could be faking all of this—biding time or simply biding patience--was still very real to him. He put up a servo.

"I have a solution."

Anicon, very slowly, sat down and laced his digits together, trembling to his last bolt.

* * *

Twenty cycles later, the elder's slow, steady, bulldozer explanation smattered with various clinching phrases all looping through his frozen processor—insidious promises, like 'a kindness', 'start afresh' and 'love you for the correct reasons'--Anicon stood up and pressed his face into his servos, stepping into the middle of the room if just to get away from the immovable force regarding him dryly from the other chair.

Outside in the white light, his love tore into another doll, sending tender hay guts puffing into the sweet air as he wrenched out a Spark-sized lump with his black fist.

"I can't do it. It would be—" he finally choked, Spark shrinking fitfully under the dark weight Tinus had put there. Hiccupped, miserably. "I c-can't ask him to do it."

"Good," Tinus said, rising with a stern creak. "I didn't expect you to."

Watching Tinus turn and stride from the room with an almost scornful glance (a stinging swat to the young mech's already seared Spark), Anicon reached out but said nothing: he merely fell back into the voided chair, curled into a quivering white ball and let his Guardian pass.


	44. Proof

A/N: My freaking GOD. HOW ABOUT THAT CHAPTER I JUST WROTE. UGH WOW WHAT.

This was... extraordinarily painful to write and I apologize for any slips in quality. I'm so happy most of you understand or are open to Anicon, and I ask you continue that for this chapter: even if he's always drunk in the moment, he's more aware than one would think and he sure as Pit didn't sign up for THIS mess. He's misinformed as to how Prowl's life was before, but think of how it would be if you had to lie to someone to make them love you, huh? Muh, poor deluded baby.

ONE MORE CHAPTER grarrargurrarRAH. Thanks again to Christy for picking this over!

* * *

Proof

* * *

It was overdue. Of course it was overdue, after nearly half a stellar-cycle living with the two mechs, but Tinus approached him about the Direct Command software as calmly and apologetically as if they had first discovered the hateful force cycling through his technological stream a megacycle ago. An abhorrent, perverse situation, a simple solution.

Prowl should have felt ecstatic. Relieved, at the least. Resentful that it had not happened sooner, despite the elder mech's seemingly endless resources. Exhausted, now that it was finally at an end. He should have felt all of these, any of these, but he didn't.

It was strange that his first full exchange with the aged Elite, such a presence in the compound, should be so formal and serious. Tinus sat across from him in his private office after ushering the young mech into the previously unseen space with a firm motion: a small measure of personal confidence that would sway him into agreeing cleanly and without pause, the effort accented by bland, bracing half-smiles and perfectly timed pauses. No, there was something about the way Tinus approached him that made him quiet down to his last component—perhaps it was the mere fact that it wasn't Anicon, running to him with a wide smile and _the news_.

As it was, the mech was rational. Convincing.

Prowl shouldn't have needed convincing.

It was an easy-enough operation. He would be put into an artificial stasis—a technological coma of sorts—where an Elite-certified, highly skilled programmer would trace the source of the overrides, locate it and sear the malevolent Direct Command from the fiber of his technomechanical innards. Simple… All it required was a full megacycle of utter defenselessness in the dark of his own prone, paralyzed body.

Prowl sat silently for long cycles, trying to reconcile his instant revulsion with the lure of having the coding servo (by now, after five months of _slips_, firmly entrenched in the worn-down wiring at every joint) removed from his neck. All the while, the bedecked young bike felt some sharp-edged, invisible targeting square sizing and resizing him and all his glittering pieces in Tinus' small, appraising blue optics. He refused, in the end.

Rather, he didn't refuse but shook his head slowly and drifted out of the large, meticulous office with heavy steps, begging distraction and the internal disorientation he had felt too many times to fake… because he couldn't allow anyone in yet. Not when he was almost starting to _remember_.

As difficult as the process was, five months had gifted him with more than extra digits on his chronometer. This slow, calm life, drifting through days with little white arms twined around his waist, was not all he had ever experienced: it simply couldn't be. There were untold dimensions to his story as delivered by his small companion, he _felt it_ in his too-hot Spark, but perhaps there were things even Anicon did not know. Certain… secrets.

Their intimate incidents had proved, beyond a silent shadow of a doubt, that Prowl had been involved with someone else. But how to fit that gripping physical knowledge into what he knew of himself and the story Anicon had laid out? More importantly, how much credit should he give himself?

Prowl, an Autobot formally trained in circuit-su and dedicated to the defense of his intellectual partner, had disappeared soon after meeting a Decepticon, leaving only an ambiguous apology. It was random, nearly unfathomable, but with thought, the possibilities narrowed. Perhaps he had been blackmailed, as the scientist feared, and manhandled onto a pirate's ship… then again, perhaps he had pretended to go away with the 'Con in order to be with this other 'bot, setting up the unexplained possibility of blackmail to soothe Anicon's injured Spark: a glass orb that could barely weather a harsh word, much less callous abandonment.

As Prowl seemed to be the 'bot he was before, he tried thinking of what he would have done in such a predicament, but it yielded nothing but confusion. The situation, then, seemed plausible enough even as the idea made him cringe with shame: his first thought was that brazenly betraying a mech as benevolent and trusting as Anicon surely merited one the second-deepest level of the Pit upon deactivation… but his time in the isolated compound had shown him other things as well.

These revelations, increasing in number and intensity over crawling solar-cycles, were ugly things he wasn't particularly proud of… like annoyance. Sour, black frustration. His guilty need for physicality, for tussles and a satisfying crunch. Dents on delicate white plating. His ability to be withholding, even—or especially—when his victim was as hapless and wanting as Anicon; who, even when spurned too spitefully for his mild, nagging needs, allowed him whatever he wanted without so much as questioning his often petty reasoning. Prowl, a mere mortal soul, was possessed of utter, god-like infallibility, unimaginable grace forced onto his ordinary black plating like high-lacquer gloss by the youngling's wide cyan optics.

It was beyond infuriating to exist with someone, equal in some ways, who was nothing but a submissive tumor in any other sense, ever-wilting for sake of simple accord: someone who would not, for the powdery life of them, push back for their own good. To be so conquered, to be so helpless! In strange, mad bursts, where the merest delicate brush of the other's servos made his rough wiring contract as if fending off a squirming invasion of the miniscule organic creatures Anicon sprayed off of his plants, it made Prowl crave to abuse him in small, precise ways: an unreturned smile, a short answer. It seemed Anicon begged for it with his shivering glass Spark and his grasping dependence only worsened as Prowl made signs of distancing himself from the small mech.

There were good solar-cycles, of course: times were he felt some sort of _something_ for the other. Nebulous as it was, it was still better than the sharp-edged void that dented his insides whenever horribly honest, disgustingly sincere Anicon flinched from a neutral word and Prowl simply couldn't contain his annoyance. Caustic energon welling high in his tubing, the bike was limited to gentle words and itching physical stillness to beat away the other's mood and groundless anxieties—and he realized again and again, with Anicon's helm set gingerly against his shoulderplating, that it was his perceived _duty_ to do so. That fact only worsened the insidious itch beneath his plating, the one that caused him to erect the dolls if just to have something to rip into.

It was especially hard to continue the farce now that he had someone else to compare the young mech to.

No. Not… someone, exactly: rather, a shade who refused to be chased from his butchered banks. Prowl finally had _memories_, dredged from the blind, dumb colors and pulses that made his blank body a playground at night. He refined them through megacycles spent in the quiet forest, sifting through his own half-emptied core and making connections between hazy, liquid, context-stripped emotions. Much like his newfound flaws, Prowl had nursed his conundrum for five months. Despite the insubstantial nature of his material, the time had not gone to waste.

It was only through his extensive circuit-su training—another memory in action—that he was able to interpret the information at all, but other complications lay beyond simply obtaining it. His memories of this 'bot… were complex. It wasn't as though the mech—it had to be a mech, it tasted too dark and sharp not to be--embodied an emotionally healthy, blooming well of love and understanding. It was safe, comfortable and affectionate, girded with unconditional acceptance and the occasional spike of annoyance (always well-deserved), but rather… guarded. Sometimes even wary: when his Spark became too warm, Prowl reigned himself in out of habit because… why? Rhythm, rhythm. Instinct, movement without words; it suited him even if he couldn't explain it!

It was solid but not explicit. Unquestionable but easily _challenged_; saturated with firm power rarely used. Hard grip, begrudgingly caring Spark. Warm in touch but not in word. Consistent. The other life, the other mech, it was drilled into his abstract banks, echoed readily by his own center. The mech was strong, silent. Appraising, yes, but Prowl knew, deep down, that the other was devoted to him and never _blinded_ by him. There was a softer presence to the side, a complimentary creature of wit and strange matronly energy, but Prowl knew his was the darker 'bot.

He also knew that if this mech showed up, he wouldn't run into their arms: it simply wasn't done. Affection was a strange thing for him, a rare, clipped emotion that squirmed through minimalist avenues rather than the grandiose, rose-scented gestures that his fawning scientist so prized. Even though Prowl would feel all the relief in the world and finally place himself, finally _fall into them_ and their mirroring frequency and sync down to his Spark, he wouldn't let himself go. This strangely precise knowledge, while functionally contradictory to what he had learned of _love_ in his current life, left him with one very solid realization: his Spark, starved and slow-boiling, did not belong to small, smiling Anicon.

Now he had to discern whether it ever had—and so, even if it would remove the servo from his neck, that effort included not letting anyone else into his databanks or processor. Not until he himself could get in and find whomever he had lost, and if that quest extended beyond what was becoming a lush prison, so be it. He could survive like this no longer.

* * *

"Mirage? Mirage."

A clean blue screen—then, with a white flash and an electronic tone, a cleaner blue mech with elegant features and an eternally appraising twist on his lips.

"Tinus, sir."

"I have a favor to ask of you. Closed transmission, if you please."

A click.

"Done."

"Thank you, Mirage."

"A simple enough request—surely you did not call for some prepackaged privacy?"

"Not precisely: you may call this favor tripartite, young friend. Is that reformatting invention from the Great Wars still operational?"

A brief, discomfited silence.

"The one we used to… convert wiped Decepticons? A little primitive, but, ah, yes. Let me--yes, sir, it's operational if not online. Perceptor keeps it in the old bunker, locked up due to its 'ruthless' nature. It has not seen light for centuries. But may I ask why you are interested?"

"If it is capable of manual reboots, I have need of it. My ward… picked up a straggler, you could say. A mech and an unfathomable blank spot, completely stripped of his serial numbers and records. Never before have I seen anyone's tag information so mutilated—I doubt even a hacker could tease a true number out of him. He is Autobot, certainly, but I'm afraid he is infected with some sort of degenerative line of code. He grows more violent by the day, displaying Decepticon traits. He is unstable, unsalvageable and, unless I am off my mark, fully trained in metallikato."

"And in your home? To think! A formidable threat, certainly."

"Indeed, and one Anicon refuses to acknowledge. This mech has nearly lost the ability to reason or vocalize, he is failing so quickly, and I do not trust him with my Ward in the slightest. The best we can hope to do is wipe him down to his Spark, personality programming and all, and have him start afresh: complete cognitive oblivion and fresh coding would be a kindness at this point. His current existence is too tortured to fathom and it is causing Anicon a good deal of pain."

"I am sorry for that, sir. I detest to see so talented a mech distracted or pained—it is a drastic step, however, and one that will have to be executed with caution. Perceptor would not approve of wiping and reformatting a fully sentient Autobot mech, no matter how homicidal, but I am of your mindset. I do not suppose Anicon is aware of your wishes?"

"Not entirely, but do not worry yourself overmuch. I am more than certain he will relish the tragedy of it."

"Pardon?"

"Nothing. He will be fine: his station in life requires that he should adapt and the mech has thus far been nothing but a severe detriment to his work and personal happiness. He will—must—be better off after, no matter the unorthodox solution that I am… so reluctant to take. Truth be told, friend, conundrums like this leave me to muse over the responsibilities of a Guardian."

"I believe it is easily summarized: the things we do for our Wards, hm?"

"Indeed—alongside the rules we break. I appreciate your help, Mirage."

"Of course, sir."

"And I do not mean to press your resources, but I also need a medic I can trust: one that will not question the sudden relocation of his or her patient to a bunker for a megacycle or two and will not speak of it beforehand. The mech must remain ignorant, or else he will become violent and possibly attack the medic. His threat cannot be underestimated and I need this to proceed quickly and cleanly."

"Easy enough to fulfill… I know a medic of just that cast, but you make it sound so shady, Tinus. I am surprised at you. You have always been so very noble. A veritable column in our timbering house."

"Desperate times and deadlines, Mirage—and you know what rank is. The ability to quietly manufacture shade and slip about in the shadows of those above you."

"True. Thankfully, friend, those above you cast a thick one. How soon will you be arriving at Cybertron?"

"I hope to make my plans converge with Anicon's presentation to the Ministry of Science, provided we can get the mech to agree to the cover operation. If my Ward actually passes his review and this plan is completed, all will be right in the world. I will call you when I have further information."

"Indeed, sir. You can have complete faith in me."

"And you in me—your help will be rewarded."

"Of course, sir. Fair thee well, sir."

* * *

A solar-cycle. One of many. One of the last.

Prowl sat in the compound's common room, datapad propped on his knees, leafing through a newsletter from the far-off, mysterious Cybertron—the place he _had_ to have come from in all his nuts and bolts, yet did not remember in the slightest. The bike scanned slowly, with little interest, musing only over his completely voided 'ancestral' memory. He had not taken to hiding from Anicon, necessarily, but there were certain strategic places that the little scientist rarely went: the commons was one of them.

Unfortunately, excuses were always on hand for invasions. A few megacycles into his dull solitude, Anicon bustled in with an armful of flora, replacing the wilted specimens in the jars around the room. Prowl ceased to read, his tightly-wound engine nearly snarling at the other's toy-like presence. The little mech could feel him watching his narrow, wheel-framed back: Prowl followed the other's self-consciously springy movements, bounces and flourishes gradually whittled down to shuffles by the cold, exacting blade of his visor.

Prowl's forgiveness had come less and less easily, his trust growing brittle with the constant tests. When he had asked Anicon about the Direct Command software and its removal, more than discomfited by what he had sensed off of Tinus, the scientist wilted and wouldn't look at him for a full cycle, nervous whine of his engine barely masked by the sounds of his lab. Nutrients distilling with thick glug-glugs, sprinklers hissing. Finally, he nodded and tried to smile, saying why not? It should never have happened in the first place and it had been going on for too long.

Prowl had to agree—but didn't believe him in the slightest. It felt wrong. Supremely wrong, so much that nauseated prickles ran along the hounded surface of his blue-white Spark. The feeling warned him, once again, not to submit to anything where he could not control what was happening. He should not… trust anyone, even the one who professed to love him so deeply.

It was the same feeling he got—alongside shock, horror and something dangerously close to hatred—when Anicon actually gave him an order ten cycles later.

It was frightened and rushed, unhidden by his usual slips of his language-banks; what most would call 'accidentally on purpose' but Anicon could not manage even that. Prowl hardly heard it but that didn't make a difference; the other gasped, pained, when Prowl stooped (frozen, no air) and handed him the trowel he had dropped. Task completed, the bike crumpled and stayed on his gaudily-armored knees once the ugly feeling had voided his insides, his visor an aghast, half-accusing sliver. Anicon, horrified, ran out of the room.

Wrong. Something, something even outside the ordinary lack of rhythm, was _wrong_.

"H-hi."

It was understandable, then, that he was less than responsive to the scientist's simple entreaties when approached. Arms empty of the flowers doomed to die in their cups, Anicon stood in front of him, servos tucked behind his back. Feeling a dark ripple from his Spark, Prowl looked up and nodded. Anicon made a noise, a compromise between a sigh and a chuckle, and sat down next to him, immediately curling up against his side with a sweet noise—or what would have been sweet if it hadn't been underscored with a melancholy, nervous whirr of his gears.

Prowl put his datapad to the side. He looked down at the scientist's face, blue nearly glowing through his shuttered optics.

"Are you lying to me?"

Anicon jerked as though slapped.

"Wh-what?" Optics opening with a shrill electronic note, the scientist straightened, a pulse of that damnably intense Spark pressing past Prowl's plating and leaving his circuits to lap up the free energy. Anxiety, nauseating and acrid. He drew breath. He laced his digits together, glanced at Prowl's face and buffered the sharp, sudden question with a shuddering pause. "A-… about what?"

"Anything."

"N-no. No, of course n-not," he gasped, ducking the ninjabot's unflinching gaze by turning his attention to his servo, which he ran nervously over Prowl's forearm. "My facts on… the past f-few stellar-cycles may be a bit fuzzy, but…why would I d--"

"There are certain advantages to twisting the truth. An erasure of complicating factors; higher compliance from an ignorant party," Prowl expanded in the same horribly steady tone, continuing to stare until Anicon, chilled by the flinty energy field buzzing so close to his lover's armor, removed the touch with a close-kept shudder. Prowl's visor thinned. "You did not tell me about my origin."

"Your ori—that wasn't your origin! It was just a p-place, somewhere you never should have ended up. And I didn't tell you b-because it was better if you'd forgotten—you see why, don't you?" he pleaded, optics flaring true blue. Then he whispered, so quietly Prowl barely even heard it: "It was… it was to protect you."

In a sense, it was true—if it was true. Prowl quieted his hunger for answers, rational thought taking over for a moment and guiding him into a softer tone: one that would actually take him somewhere with a mech who feared confrontation as one fears a brutally splintered Sparkchamber. He placed a servo on the young Elite's arm, bringing Anicon's mournful gaze up with a slow stroke of his digits.

"And yet I am here to protect you."

Anicon's fans skipped at his gentle tone, his widened visor and soft touch; hope gushing into his face and bursting from his white chassis in a fresh wave, he began to reach up.

"N-no, Prowl, you're s-so much more than a bodyg—"

A single look, hidden optics burning fiercely, quieted him and made his questing servos drop, reminding him what this was about. Lying. The white mech almost choked at the emotional whiplash, quelling his want for Prowl's arms by clutching along his own skinny limbs. They were silent.

"I don't see why you w-want to talk about this. It only… upsets you."

"You have been nervous lately," Prowl said after a long, creaking moment, vocals once more a flat blade, prying at the other's chamber.

It was true. His strange stutter-glitch had nearly doubled in the time they had been together, other strange, rigid behaviors surfacing like viruses. Small betrayals besides that. Anicon just shook his head, antennae whipping back and forth.

"M-my, um. My funding is up for renewal, it's… only natural. I have to make a p-presentation to the Ministry of Science next week, proving all the progress I've made with—well, it's… yes," he murmured. He looked up and, searching Prowl's neutral face, found enough pastel courage to say the next bit playfully, giving the other mech a soft nudge. "I don't like talking in front of all of those scientists. It's j-just review nerves, Prowl. Quelling them is s-supposed to be your job."

Prowl's visor thinned once again, the dark shift not at all what Anicon intended.

"It seems the most I am used for," he murmured caustically.

"Oh—oh no, Prowl. I didn't mean it like that," he protested, mild vocals nothing more than a hushed, anxious whisper pressing against Prowl's cold black plating, feeling for cracks to slip into. Regardless, something riled in the small mech for a split-klik when his bodyguard refused to look at him: Prowl could almost hear it spurt through his orderly insides, or feel him struggling with the prickly, unfamiliar emotion as it worked through his soft shell. "You're—you're just being—"

"Unfair?"

Even when the words were put into his mouth—the perfect words, formulated by the one who deserved them and therefore guiltless—he wilted, stuttering. Prowl's engine snarled.

"Well, I—"

"Perhaps I am. Conversely, perhaps it is only natural to question one's purpose in a world where they seem to have left no mark: and so I ask again, why are there no files, no images of us?" he demanded, rising and distancing himself from the weak mech and his inevitable capitulation. Anicon, absorbing the echo of his revulsion as a physical seismic shock, got up as well, already wringing his servos as Prowl turned to glare at him. "Why don't you deign to download one single _moment_ for me?"

"I t-_told_ you, Prowl, they said I—the s-sla—they said I couldn't download anything for you, that even putting anything into your memory core or taking it out w-would make the files come unlocked! It's ho-horribly dangerous!"

"Convenient," he hissed, turning away. He heard pistons skip behind him. A tiny engine wailed.

"You kn-know what? I'm j-just—maybe I'm just nervous because you keep b-badgering me about this!" Anicon finally snapped, grasping for every word, his stutter-glitch nearly obscuring his speech.

It was the first time he had stood up for himself. It was the first and only time that Anicon would ever show anything short of an intact backstrut—not desperation but actual rational courage--but Prowl was at the point where nothing, not even the most well-executed of personal growths, could have satisfied him.

"This? _This_?" he snarled, whipping around and motioning to his wounded center. "I am this!"

His steps were loud, crushing the tinny patter of Anicon's pedes as the other mech backed up, away from him.

"You profess to be sensitive to my every need and yet you deny me myself! You accept—_worship_--me but do not understand me, you do not make the _effort_ before you simply capitulate!"

"N-no, I—what do you m-mean? Of course I accept you, I love every part of you--Prowl, can't you see? I l-love you."

"If you love me, you do so senselessly!" Prowl snapped.

"L-love is—love is senseless sometimes! Why are you b-being like this? You—we've been so happy!" he cried piteously. "I just want to b-be with you: let me understand what you mean. I'll do a-anything for you. Anything to make you see that I love you!"

"Then give me proof!"

"I don't have any!" he burst out, pressing his anguished face into his toy-like servos--then he grabbed Prowl's servo and pressed it to his chamber, hunching around the touch as though aching to draw the other mech to his center, delicate face pained. He shook his head, dimmed optics directed at the floor. "I d-d-don't have any. Nothing but what I feel for you, here. Shouldn't that… b-be enough? Isn't that what matters?

Prowl stood and simply watched him shudder, waiting a long, painful moment before drawing his servo back with cold strength and speaking again, vocals dangerously deep.

"So—I should be content to feed off someone else's invisible memories on faith, coddled and forever the derivative, with you as my sole personal compass? I should give myself up so completely, abandoning rationale and common sense as you have done so eagerly for me?" the older mech demanded, every component working furiously as he slashed his servo through the air between them. Anicon flinched, a tiny, agonized sound escaping him. "No. _No_. You want to understand me—you ask me how I feel, Anicon? I feel I am being _kept_."

Kept in the house, kept _from_ something, it didn't matter anymore.

"Prowl—Prowl, _please_—"

"No."

Prowl had been trapped for months but, seeing Anicon's horrified, _exposed_ expression, he finally felt the walls in all of their scraping proximity. He finally felt the airless, closed system into which he had been awakened (his current reality consisted of only the Elite and his guardian and two could tell a lie with passing fluency); the meticulous sting of the silk threads the Elite had looped around him, convincing him he was staying of his own volition when really he was restraining him in whatever small way he could. Force-fed ideas as if from a tube. For months, Prowl was immobilized through six-digit expectations and subtleties, through imaginary promises and sick-sweet guilt.

Now, even if they had spent over a century together in his distant past, that time was over—just as this time was. Anicon could feel the weight of his decision, unspoken but radiating from his compact black chassis and stance, and it closed around his young Spark like a vice, fatal finality mirroring the ice walls that cut Prowl off from himself. Anicon fumbled back and collapsed into a chair, one servo pressed to his wildly quailing Spark, frame shaking.

"L-l-listen to—I know, oh P-primus I _know_ you're con-confused but--Prowl, all of th-this would just… g-go away if you--"

"Your solution! The surgery?" Prowl barked, eviscerating the other's stumbling thought-train with a speed only gifted by hateful, manic energy five long months in brewing.

"_Yes_!" Anicon sobbed, pressing his face into his servos again as Prowl stalked away from him, servos clenched into fists. "Oh P-primus, please stop y-yelling. Please stop, I can't take you yelling at me. You're just—it's the software, it's m-making you upset! You're just—just stressed, you d-don't _mean_ this—!"

Pressed to his breaking point, the young Elite heaved himself up from the chair with a wounded cry and rushed towards Prowl, towards the arms that were still rigid and by his sides, ending in hooked servos. Prowl, burnt from the inside out and repulsed by the thought of those weak, manipulative servos pawing at his back (he couldn't be touched, needed to stand alone instead of being smothered, needed _air_), caught the flimsy model by the wrists when Anicon came within range. His dark servos clamped into the tiny joints and yanked the scientist to him, immediately twisting him into a metallikato hold that placed his snarling mouth flush to the scientist's audio unit and one servo to the other's chamberplating. He jerked, tightening and feeling for the squeal of metal.

"Silence!" he hissed. "If you make one more excuse in my name, I will be gone tomorrow. I will leave you and never once look back."

Afire with rage, Prowl gripped the young mech, frozen in his arms, until he realized what he was doing—that his hot blue ember was roaring at the other's back as his digits trembled, aching to _dig in_ to such soft metal. He craved to plunge down and injure something defenseless out of nothing more than mad, directionless fury, giving vent to the hideous yellow potential energy ripping along his black tensors. He could see and feel Anicon's wide, blank optics, pointed at the ceiling as he trembled from his abused center, his own bird-bone trust betrayed.

The anger calcified then chilled in Prowl's limbs, only worsened by the quiet, empty commons and the flowers; creaking, he released his hold. Anicon, as though in a soundless nightmare, stumbled away and stood, hunched and teetering, with his arms limp at his sides. Slowly, they rose and he clutched his chassis, touching the tiny black scrapes left by Prowl's hooked digits.

Prowl, guilt and shame siphoning any glow from his Spark, hung his head and shuttered his optics.

"I… apologize."

Anicon did not turn around. He simply felt the scratches on his chamber plating and seemed to retreat a level: his Spark, always velvety and haloed with young white light, shrank. He shook his head, antennae swaying minutely.

"You… y-you wouldn't do this," he whispered brokenly. "Not if you…"

_--if you loved me_.

Stricken as he was, once more in debt to this broken, defenseless mech and his simple wants, Prowl could not apologize for it. There was too much sorrow—too much to regret to begin to put it into words, nor would it ever be enough.

"I have felt another," Prowl admitted quietly, miserably, experiencing his betrayal all over again in the face of the other's devotion—devotion, no matter how misdirected, that meant everything to the diminutive scientist. Anicon seemed to freeze up, servos stilling from their anxious roaming over his arms, but said nothing.

"His presence is… ingrained in my very Spark. Who is he?" he asked, gesturing pleadingly—not truly directing anything towards the empty 'bot in front of him, but more the universe at large. He turned from the scientist with dimmed optics, gazing out of the window and into the bright, incomprehensible sunlight. His entire body was sapped, held together only by expensive polish and decorative armor. "I simply want to know who he is."

"He doesn't care about you."

"…What?"

Anicon's breathless, hunted murmur made Prowl turn, confusion growing on his long face. The young scientist shook his head, every movement cramped and jittery.

"He was filth from the beginning, he doesn't _care_—"

"What are you talking about?"

Anicon turned around suddenly, servos knotted tightly together over his chamber.

"He sold you."

Prowl stared at him uncomprehendingly, every ominous word locked outside his numb plating, gathering like a lead wave and waiting to punch in and strike the last of the light from his battered Spark. He tried to speak but Anicon burst in again, trembling madly.

"I didn't want to t-tell you, but he sold you to them. To that place. After he got through with you," he said fearfully, soft vocals tainted with a tense dullness, echoed by the flickering, blank blaze of his blue optics. "He n-never loved you. Never. Just… used you."

"Anicon?" he demanded, stepping toward him. As if broken from a horrified trance by his movement, the scientist jerked and dug his servos into his arms with an anguished noise, the shards of all of his love and care and mutilated expectations gouging inwards and destroying whatever grace he had left, sending his own five-months worth of saccharine poison welling to the surface of his flawless white plating like blood.

"All I wanted to do was s-save you!" he screamed, servos closing over his helm as he buckled at the knees, sweet face warping. "Y-you don't know where you came from, how bad it was! You don't know anything and I would have g-given up anything for you! All I ever wanted was to make you happy, why c-can't you understand that?!"

Making a static-thick keening noise as though someone had struck him a killing blow, Anicon straightened and sprinted out of the room, hysterical, unsteady footsteps fading as he escaped into the corridors of their prison, leaving Prowl alone with himself.

He did not move for a long time. The moment he did, the first thing that hit him was shame: shame for destroying someone who cared for him. No matter how pitifully sensitive the soul, one could not see that kind of true anguish without responding to it—and why would Anicon seek to hurt him, Prowl reasoned blankly. Perhaps the Elite was trying to protect him, knowing how he had been… misused before. Perhaps this was the best Anicon could do for him—and perhaps he truly did not want to know.

Insides scraped of any last amount of strength, Prowl wandered out of the commons, quietly horrified at how little he knew about himself.

After a short time, he found himself at the communication console in one of the side rooms, used for calls and datastorage. He stared at it for a moment, then, as though sleepwalking, activated the screen with a careful dab of his digit. Drawn to the steady light and with little else to occupy his cauterized processor, Prowl browsed the contents, accessing the main databanks with a few bypass shortcuts and scrolling through the files inside. Then, there, right at the top—Anicon.

Anicon's files. It was hardly a decision to hack it so much as a vehement need instantly translated into tick-tacking digits and a thinned visor, his CPU flaring to life as the non-technologically-savvy's botanist's defenses dropped one by one under his steady attack. Perhaps he had never erected any, thinking himself safe in a closed system at such an isolated location—perhaps he was just Anicon, ever-trusting and naïve. Either way, he found it.

It? The only thing worth finding other than countless sets of data logged in from the lab, set apart from its brethren by a password (easily surmised) and a folder labeled 'P'. It was a frequency. It was free-range by the look of it: the structure was different, made for constant relocation and deep-space communication. He stared at it. While he doubted meek Anicon's ability to _have_ secrets stowed in a file, Prowl's search for any sort of affirmation or proof had turned up empty—or it should have, if the frequency hadn't _killed_ him in a split-klik, too-large-to-fathom way. It only happened for an instant: a mere convulsion of his coding, Spark flaring outward almost painfully.

Brief as it was, that same convulsion led him to reroute the frequency into the main line and form a connection before he could even think about the stupidity of calling up a random frequency or just doing it in plain sight, but he knew, percentages streaming through his processor, that Tinus was off on another planet and Anicon was disposed of for at least a megacycle. He had enough time—and twice that much desperation. Prowl keyed a few strokes and pressed initiate.

The line rang. And rang. And rang.

The black screen stretched on, unwavering as his need. He felt the pinpricks and utter paralysis of fear fade, only to be replaced by despair. It was an abandoned frequency and a pathetic hope—probably nothing more than a business contact. Somehow, with this black screen, he was resigned to this life. He could not leave, not when Anicon was truly all he had and it would mean destroying the other. Prowl began to turn away from his last chance, shuttering his optics… then someone shouted from a distance on the other end, and Prowl heard them. Vocals.

Deep, mangled vocals that sounded horrifyingly, thrillingly important.

"Primus, hold a—damnit—"

The screen wavered and booted up, pixels flaring red and black. The lens adjusted, framing a behemoth of a mech in an oversized, scratched-up navigators chair, white facial plating glowing in the dark. His optics were unlit maroon chips and a blank sigil claimed the front of his black chassis, other colors hardly visible in the burning backup lighting. He leaned forward onto his knees, flicking his sole servo.

"Whaddya want?"

Prowl only stared, standing with one servo above the terminate button. Rustling and scraping in the pressing darkness, the mech started to growl something else, patience quickly spent, and looked up. He onlined his red optics—and froze. He did not simply stop, but stalled down to his last creaking component, experiencing a small, wrenching death as the young, slender bike model stared at him from the well-lit cream room, Autobot sigil gleaming on his chassis.

"Kid?" he rasped, optics widening. Prowl, struck dumb, looked behind him, as though that searing stare had to have been meant for some other 'bot. A violent screech and clank made him look back; the old mech had risen from his seat and was inches from the commscreen, pressing as close as he could to the black and gold creature who lay thousands of light-years and one hollow stellar-cycle away.

"Hol—is that you?"

"What?" Prowl whispered, so faintly it hardly made it past his lips. Hearing his soft, prim vocals for the first time, however, no matter the single lost word, Lockdown crumpled with an anguished creak and braced himself on the control panel, raising a thorny fist and slamming it into the metal with an echoing boom. He did nothing but curse for a full cycle, haphazard and raw as roars or sobs, finally rousing himself with a breathless, pressing:

"Slag—where are you?"

"I am…"

Prowl vocals faded, utterly blown away by the situation. Who was this 'bot, crouching in the dark with black daggers framing his red optics? Why did his Spark jump to see it? Like Anicon's anguish, the mech's intensity was such that he couldn't help but respond to it. But his servos, shaking madly with a mind of their own, crept back over the terminate button, because once again, he was betraying Anicon's trust—hacking into his private matters and abusing the one mech who had tried to give him everything, even blessed ignorance. As though sensing the shift, the mech made a violent motion, drawing his optics back to the screen.

"You still there? Damnit, Prowl, spit it out!"

His name. This mech knew his name. How could it be? A muted explosion ravaged his insides and he said the only thing he could say. The only thing he could think of.

"I am not in danger," he whispered, visor wide.

"Don't you give me that," the mech snarled, red optics flaring wildly. "Prowl. _Prowl_. Look at me! Primus, why the frag haven't you—fraggin'—idiot! You _idiot!_ I'll come get you: where the Pit are you? Where _are you_?!"

"Prowl?"

His name, so prized in those rough vocals, now came from further away in the house, floating in timid and soft like Anicon always was—like Anicon would, in a matter of kliks. Startled, Prowl glanced back, wiring tensing at the thought of the Elite finding him like this, then looked to the screen helplessly, memorizing every detail of the mech's beastly face before reaching for the terminate button. The mismatched mech saw the motion… possibly he traced the stiff, scared thought that Anicon _could not know_. Combined with the look of unknowing anguish on the young Autobot's face, the realization crushed Lockdown closer to the mech he gave up everything to find, pressing his servo against the screen and clawing forward as he roared:

"Prowl, _no_—"

Black screen. Log off. Anicon padded into the room like a will-o-the-wisp the moment the communication console went quiet. Prowl turned from the terminated call with a lost expression on his long, sad face—one that the little scientist absorbed into his own anguish and used to rush forward, sobbing everything he believed Prowl ever wanted to hear. Prowl, reeling, was forced to hold a mortified, shuddering Anicon while his processor raced and put him in a vice he'd never imagined.

He had someone. Someone had him. Wanted him. Finally, his meticulously structured world-shell shattered and the light streamed in, real and sharp. Good or bad, the shadows began to disperse. Carefully, he held Anicon until he quieted; even kissed him, leading the tiny, shivering mech to his berthroom to rest off their argument.

The next time he tried it, coolant running so high that pearls of condensation dripped off his black plating, the frequency was deleted.


	45. Answered

A/N: AHA. And I said the last one was hard to write? AHAHA oh hell. Anicon. ANICONNNN :whinewhine:. This is like, really graphic. Ugh. UGH. I'm so abusive. (Those of you who predicted that Ani would lose his mind in the course of this? You get a hug and a cookie.)

Also, I'm sorry there was confusion on the last chapter: someone in the house, probably Tinus, deleted the frequency from the computer. So. Yes. :D Evil bastard, but we already knew that.

Thank you so much again for all of your support, guys—you make me one of the happiest creatures on this earth! You're fantastic! Hopefully this, and all that comes after, lives up to all of your expectations.

* * *

Answered

* * *

Moving forward was their only option.

Though he trembled under Prowl's servos, Anicon still trained every morning. They went for drives in the forest; Prowl assisted the scientist in his lab, a great help collecting and cataloging specimens in preparation for Anicon's colossal presentation which was only a few solar-cycles and a space-shuttle away. There was no reconciliation and no further discussion, only the squeezed, empty sensation of a held breath as the two mechs drifted together without a word, optics averted.

Despite—or perhaps because of—how cataclysmic the upset had been, there was little more to do than follow, step by shaking step, the patterns they had laid out for themselves until things made a little more sense.

There was much to do to get ready for the board's review. Unfocused as he was, Prowl thanked every pristine moment his servos were busy, either with data or dirt. It was fortunate that the imperative nature of the task at hand allowed him and Anicon to interact with each other in the shadowed blue lab without actually _acknowledging_ one another--otherwise, sapped even of his solid, clear anger, he would not have been able to hide his shock.

His world had been overturned by a single megacycle of screaming and one desperate commcall. It felt as though every clean, rational component in him had been knocked free, to creak and shiver in rhythm with his distressed Spark; he spent megacycles simply _sitting_ and attempting to steady himself as his mixed reality disintegrated and congealed in bursts, but he couldn't appear overly… pensive, to either Anicon or Tinus.

He had agreed to the surgery the solar-cycle after, receiving a bracing, barely-felt handshake from Tinus in return for his compliance. With Anicon's presentation, perhaps they would have taken him along to Cybertron anyways, but submitting outright was the only way to assure his inclusion and blind Tinus by way of a final goal: if Prowl, essentially alone and friendless, was on Cybertron to have the reviled Direct Command software removed from his tortured insides, the older mech would never expect his Ward's dedicated lover to bolt into the multicolored crowd the moment he could find an exit, streaking toward any source of protection. Anyplace they could help him.

"_You still there? Damnit, Prowl, spit it out!"_

Painful as it was, Prowl knew more than he ever had before. He had a life. He had someone, once—perhaps he still had that someone, if he acted quickly enough. The frequency had been deleted from the compound's databanks but someone on Cybertron had to know who the mech was; someone had to know who _he_ was and Prowl intended to find them, no matter the cost. He would wait until Anicon was in his review and Tinus was otherwise occupied, then leave.

No words, no warning. It would be… more efficient that way.

There was no point in telling Anicon. Not when Prowl truly had nothing to say and he had no intention of coming back, even if his quest only proved that he was utterly alone in this life. If his _story_ wasn't just that—a fabricated, wishful chain of events--and there was the smallest bit of truth to what the Elite had told him when he first awoke so long ago, Prowl could almost see why he had simply _left_ before, contrary as it was to his civil nature. As one craves enlightenment, Prowl ached for the impartial, blank navy skies of Cybertron; the scuffed metal underfoot and the countless anonymous, honest mechs and femmes traversing highways and hallways, none possessing any feverish reason to hold him so tightly and lie to love; to smother while promising freedom in none of the ways that mattered.

Things would make sense on Cybertron, surely. It was an open world with no squirming personal deceit; a natural home, subject to natural laws. His only hope.

The ninjabot grew more and more nervous as the solar-cycle approached, weighing the danger of Tinus' looming surgery and mentally preparing for his escape, but Anicon accepted his silence alongside his own. The burdened scientist was too absorbed in his own guilt and anxiety and workload to be aware of Prowl's small starts, only breaking from his terminal melancholy to grasp at the other's limp servo at a hallway junction or force some trembling touch on Prowl's cool black plating as he was overcome by whatever emotion could be blind to the eternal vice of passivity—a toxic force long at work through Prowl's ice-blue visor and thin mouth.

For the moment, it was enough that Prowl was still beside him: a fact Prowl intended to use to its full advantage until he betrayed the small mech in a single engine rev.

* * *

"Regulate your intake. Reach a rhythm, part and parcel of your internal workings. Sensitize your plating; feel your own components, all and one."

Prowl had focused mainly on meditation the past week of training: Anicon, besides his pitiable combat skills, had a level of nervous, scattered energy that seemed wholly incompatible with the focused, essential act, but the recent tension between the two mechs did not allow for constant, guiding touch. They sat apart in the soft yellow pit, locked into position with loose carpal joints, digits arched delicately as though drawing a silk thread from the crisp air. Anicon had ceased onlining his optics to sneak wretched glances at him, but it was an exercise in futility regardless: Prowl could not possibly meditate with the other's wild current fretting at the morning air, nor the nervous tempest rattling inside his own chassis. The bike model remained still all the same, waiting in silence for this step of their solar-cycle to end.

A half-megacycle in, he needed to move: his pristine circuitry was bloated with the scientist's ugly buzzing energy offal, the conflicting waves tangling into an internal itch. Sighing deeply through his half-shuttered intakes, Prowl lit his visor; Anicon still sat a few steps away, perched atop the yellow sand like a toy, but his servos had gone limp over his awkwardly-angled legs, fine features twisted miserably as he sat out their mediocre torture.

Prowl knelt and reached over, rearranging the young Elite's position with quick, impartial touches. Anicon still flinched, onlining his optics in surprise and almost wincing away from the other mech's blank frown. Prowl was pressing the scientist's legs further apart when something exploded at the front of the compound, sending hellish reverberations through the very sand they sat in.

Anicon cried out, all aching restraint and guilt disintegrating in a metallic whirr and a blunt clang as the scientist clung to Prowl in a panic, nearly scrambling into his lap to escape the convulsion of hard ground. Prowl, pistons firing, wrenched both of them to their pedes and pressed the little mech to his chassis, barely feeling Anicon's arms lock around his back through the ferocious burst of coding from his battle computer. He narrowed his visor and scanned the landscape. Another explosion tore up the ground further to the right, dirt and purple-green undergrowth flying up into the air and pattering the ground with a sound like rain. Anicon whimpered, digits hooking into the spaces behind the bike's boosters and Prowl snatched up a shuriken with his free servo, curved blades springing free with a snap.

"Stay close to me."

Another boom, deeper in the surrounding forest; an organic shrieked. Anicon gasped, shaking madly.

"W-what's—"

Prowl jerked as something far too close to him emitted a muted electronic tone; Anicon jumped as well, but cocked his head as though receiving a transmission, blue optics wide and bright. The Elite shook his head nervously after a moment, grip only intensifying as he told Prowl what the bike already knew in fragmented sentences: as per Tinus' orders, he was to guard the back of the compound while Anicon took shelter inside. The ninjabot, visual field slashed with all variety of swift in-depth scans, immediately pushed the younger mech toward the compound and equipped his other shuriken with a whipping motion. Anicon stumbled to a halt, looking back fearfully with his servos clasped in front of him.

"Go," Prowl ordered him, looking from side to side with a dangerously thin visor. "Now."

He opened his mouth to repeat himself when Anicon hesitated, then grunted tensely as the tiny mech rushed him, straining up and seizing his long face and pushing their mouths together for a fumbling klik. He drew away and looked pleadingly into Prowl's surprise-blue visor, delicate digits trailing down his facial plating.

"B-be safe. Please be safe."

Anicon ducked into the bike's neck for a trembling moment then turned and ran, transforming with a hysterical series of clicks and bolting for the back entrance. Prowl turned towards the half-circle of organic forest and tightened down to his last tensor, every whirring system on high alert. Even as he watched with the rationale of a soldier open to three sides of attack, that strange memory-rhythm stole his thumping mechanics again, feral and unfathomably eager.

He was alone, blessedly alone for the first time, seared from all sides by guttural explosions and possessed of a beautifully well-programmed body—the only thing he could claim about himself without pause. His digits twitched around his shuriken. Coolant gushed underneath his chilly plating. His fuel cells willfully funneled Energon into every slim black limb to feed kicks or punches or a furious dash; he waited with an optic turned to every dark gap in the purple-green forest, an intoxicatingly slow current stilling him before the strike.

His scans, though strangely specialized for a tagless Autobot soldier, did not pick up on the oily distortion in the air behind him; the explosions, ever-increasing and tainting his sensors with their webs of reverberation, masked the heavy steps on the dense soil.

Prowl turned toward the front of the compound for a moment, hearing a different kind of commotion—vocals--rising above the scattered booms, then faced the forest again, given no warning as something huge and undeniably inorganic and _unseen_ closed around his arm with a creak. He hissed, processor spasming as he jerked away from the gaping hole to his left. The motion did not free him; instead, chalky scrapes arced across his high-gloss armor polish, so he kicked against the dirt and plowed forward with a snarl, slashing wildly at the invisible creature with his shuriken, given no mind for the vital points of something he could not even see.

The 'bot—had to be, he heard gears and an irate blip--jerked, growl fleshed out into a roar with another girder-rattling explosion from the forest. It was a wrenching sensory overload, with so many close, threatening noises, and somehow his enemy slipped aside or shifted his massive weight in one slick invisible movement, then used Prowl's momentum to wrench him to the side and toss him to the ground with a clank; he made a short, thick noise, shuriken clattering away. The ninjabot heard another harsh sound or word from behind him, but was on his pedes the next instant, tensors twanging, visual field crowded with any scanning program that would _let him see_.

His pistons slammed against his abdominal shell, distant forest still as death—were there more of them? He had to protect the compound. Anicon. At the slightest crunch of foliage—there, a massive square pede-print on the grass, filled by nothing but cold metal air—he leapt forward again with a jolt of fiery electricity, feral digits hooked.

"Show yourself, cowa—"

Though he could not even see the 'bot, he had sensed his enemy as a massive, looming weight, capable of both speed and slamming force: an accurate assumption that he felt in all its two-ton poundage as the 'bot crashed into him to rival an explosion, processor nearly stalling at the rattling impact. They fell to the ground with an echoing slam of metal-on-metal-on-soil, Prowl already groping along the hard invisible chassis for a vital pressure point. His wrists were seized and his enemy grappled with him, forcing them both, kicking and struggling, down into the nearby sandpit and out of sight.

They tumbled; Prowl ended up on his back, an abominable black weight pressing him down into the sand, which slithered in between all of his armor plates and ground into his tender wiring. He writhed and arched, dentals grit tightly, but he was pinned at all four limbs. The first trace of true fear burst from his exposed chassis in a curtailed energy wave. His young Spark, caged in by a tender chamber and rippable black wires and silicon sheeting, palpitated wildly just feet from the rasping, vibrating presence. He froze in fear, but perhaps the inability to fight opened his audio receptors: so pinned, he finally made sense of the growl, repeated over and over—ignored, over and over--with every defensive grab or toss the enemy dealt him. He finally _heard_.

"Prowl—_Prowl_."

He stilled, engine dying in one whirring, whining gasp. He simply… stopped. Then, right before his widened blue visor, the cloaking device dissipated with a sharp electronic tone and an oily bleeding of reality and the tall, dark mech from the commcall was outlined against the white sky, spikes casting wicked shadows over Prowl's splayed form. He aspirated haltingly, bright red optics fixed on the ninjabot's long, blank face. The hard grip tightened on his arms, then released.

"Prowl," the mech rasped. "S'me."

It was like magic, too sudden to believe and out of context in this hemmed-in fantasy world. But it was real; so real it scraped along his armor and blocked the sun. It was the mech come from star-studded blackness unknown, from the even greater black of his memory banks; the one who could barely speak at the sight of him and roared when he himself was lost to oblivion again by a simple press of a button.

Prowl saw it, yes, but when the other's muscular presence washed over him, flooding his shocked, defenseless systems, he felt it. The connection.

Prowl stiffened underneath the other mech, visor flaring aquamarine in shock. His Spark blazed outward, hot and full, and the strange spiked mech's Spark answered him instantaneously, _desperately_, seeming to fill all the gaps in Prowl's coding and existence in a single heady burst of dense red energy. It was the first pulse of promise and completion and _comfort_ Prowl had ever felt. No, it was the first solid, true thing he had ever been given and Primus, it felt beautiful. His Spark recognized what his memory banks could not, recognized it with energy and pulse and true life where numbers and encoded data failed and the feeling was beyond a fizzling stimulation of circuitry; it was otherworldly. Still reeling from the other's pull on his center, Prowl reached up and touched the mech's scarred, dirt-smeared facial plating with trembling digits, aspirating brokenly. Overwhelmed.

With that touch, he finally… blossomed. Extended. Released. His Spark returned to full size in his chamber, a warm, wanting blot and no longer a condensed ball of slow, lost terror. He was whole again.

Wrapped as Prowl was in his own sweeping redefinition, he could sense that the 'bot above him had weathered a similar experience: shaking visibly, the huge, fearsome musclecar looked like he had far too much to say to him, half of it very, very enraged and tense and achingly baffled… but in the end, he just let out a strangely anguished rumble and pressed his strange white face against Prowl's own for a nanoklik, Spark _clenching_ in his huge green-striped chassis. Prowl's followed suit dumbly, momentarily contracting into an anxious ball of light at the simple energy flare. The two mechs stared at one another for a moment, blue and red glowing with the full force of their restored centers.

"What the… black Pit're you wearin'?" the mech finally growled, deep, crushed vocals nearly incomprehensible, then ripped Prowl to his pedes and shoved him out of the pit. Within moments, they were walking, the juggernaut's servos crunched tensely around his decorative shoulder-armor as he propelled the disoriented bike toward the tree line.

"C'mon. Torque's doin' the flash work at the front, puttin' her fanbelts on the line for you. _Move_."

Prowl stumbled. It was all too fast. His visor thinned, insides fluttering and choking; the mech gave him a brusque push, razor-edged apprehension palpable now that his cloaking shield was off. He glared from side to side, red optics narrowed to exacting slits.

"Big gal's just over the ridge, we gotta get back to her and—the _Pit're_ you doin', y'gotta—"

Prowl fell this time, a victim of his shaky mechanics and another push, but the jolt to his pedes seemed to get his processor working again. Methodical, wary logic cooled the supernatural quickening he had felt, turning fantasy-red magma to crusty careful coal. Suddenly, the ninjabot remembered Anicon, alone and hiding in the house--and the fact he truly had no idea who this mech was. This musclecar, nearly twice as tall as he was and crafted of garish, scuffed parts and a harsh, old aura, was a stranger to him: one who was apparently involved in attacking the compound and looked at him as though he could commit murder if Prowl didn't come along quickly and quietly.

They hadn't gotten far at all. They were just a few strides past the pit; besieged and ignorant, Prowl trembled. Unconsciously, nervously, he forced them to halt and turned to stare at the cream and brown compound, reaching for the only thing he had ever known in his short life.

"I… I cannot—" he murmured thickly, newly fleshed-out Spark quivering in nauseating confusion. The mech opened his mouth to speak—Prowl heard the menacing growl of his engine and turned toward him, visor bent at a helpless angle—but someone else spoke first.

"G-get away from him."

Both turned. Standing a few spans from the compound, twiggy legs braced unnaturally far apart, Anicon stood with a pistol cocked in his shaking servos. Prowl made a faint, shocked noise that hardly did justice to the sudden convulsion of his systems, anxiety only doubling to see the laser sight trained in a swerving, mad pattern on the musclecar's horribly scratched chassis. Prowl took a step back, reaching blindly until his servo connected with the mech's wiry arm; touching him, he felt the dark ripple as the other's servo tightened into a fist, engine gunning low and dangerous.

"You," he sneered, red optics locked on the tiny white mech. His vocals, already mangled, were so low that Prowl registered them as nothing more than a poisonous rumble in his girders, saturated with dawning hatred. Prowl searched his twisted white face for any sort of connection or understanding, then turned back to Anicon—who he realized was looking at _him_ with wide, terrified optics.

"Get away f-from that_ Pit-spawn_!"

The order was for him. The little scientist's vocals were so anguished and strained—underscored with a hysterical buzz, all shrill, prickling feedback—that Prowl moved without thinking, all too conscious of the precise sizzle of the red laser sight on the dark mech's chest. He managed one step before the selfsame mech's arm whipped out in front of him, blocking his way as much as the strangely desperate blaze of his optics—as though the slightest distance between them would be too much to bear, after an empty, mad stellar-cycle surviving in the dark.

"Don't you move, kid," he growled through his dentals, optics locked on Prowl's twisted visor with a tight-jawed intensity that nearly made the ninjabot's Spark skip a pulse. "Don't you dare move."

He wouldn't allow more than a few steps. Not after how far he'd come—not after the gaping probability he'd escaped.

Prowl, caught, watched with growing horror, once more frozen by the pure insanity of the scene. Anicon should be inside ducking the blasts, not clutching at a firearm and screaming across the fresh air. The mech should have had his arms up; should have buckled or at least stilled under the threat of a single shot and a shattered chamber, because even though he looked capable of snapping the tiny model in half with a single arm, anyone could wield a gun to kill. Instead, the musclecar drew Prowl back to his side, huge claw servo—blue, unmatched to the rest of his body—closing around the back of the young bike's neck. Prowl's neural network burst to life at the firm touch, sending a bewildered, full-body shiver through him.

"Let him go! I'll shoot you!" the young Elite burst out, staggering forward and aiming again, shaking visibly. "I won't let you touch him, not after what you d-did to him--! Y-you have no right to order him to do anything, no right at all!"

"And you do?" the mech responded slowly, servo twitching against Prowl's neck; his optics were locked on the gun. A panicked electronic note erupted from the small model across the pit; his engine whined, clean, compact genius processor surely rushing and making a mirroring noise. He gasped after a moment then grit his dentals, blue optics narrowing into slits.

"I'll speak in the only way you c-can understand, bounty hunter: property. T-technically I own your _partner_," Anicon snapped with stumbling difficulty, jabbing forward with the humming gun as the black and green mech took a booming step toward him, free servo knotting at his side. His wide mouth twisted into a snarl, baring a black gap in his dentals; Anicon flinched, speeding up. "And if you d-dare try to 'liberate' Prowl, I can and will levy charges against you in a formal court of law."

"I ain't above stealin'," the mech rasped after an endless, crackling silence, creaking as he leaned closer to the Elite over the space between them. His spiked shoulder-plating cast evil shadows that crept up the dirt. "Or murder."

"Or slave-trafficking, apparently."

No matter how his vocals trembled, Anicon's sight stayed in one warm area: Sparkchamber. They wouldn't be having this conversation except for the gun pointed at the intruder's chassis: Prowl knew, with the caged buzzing physical intensity radiating from the musclecar, that he would have slung him over his shoulder and run if Prowl had hesitated a moment longer. The older mech fought not to do so before, even if it meant risking a shot, but now he stilled down to his huge pedes, free servo flexing unsteadily. The mech's optics widened, then narrowed uncomprehendingly.

"What'd you say?"

Every word was a homicidal hiss but Anicon was too swathed in his own pious fervor to feel the sting. The young scientist aspirated harshly, refreshing his vocals.

"You sold him. Admit it," he demanded, servos tightening on the gun with a panicked creak as his vocals rocketed upward into a hateful shriek. "Admit it right here and now, you finished with Prowl and then you sold him and left him to die!"

Prowl, still connected by that claw on his neck, nearly buckled from the influx of rage and disbelief and, above all, pure horror that pulsed from the mech's old, rough center. It zinged through the rough metal against his plating. The bike looked up at the musclecar and saw the pain of an empty stellar-cycle mocked—a stellar-cycle only granted reprieve by a glimpse into what _he_ had endured and another crushing disappointment, followed by more echoing blackness. Horrific fury twisted the other's feral white face.

"You're a sick little glitch," he hissed, vocals thick. "That what you been telling him?"

"It's the t-truth!"

"I'll rip your Spark _right outta you_," the mech bellowed, clenching at the air with a fierce involuntary crank of gears.

"_Say it right now!_"

The gun jerked up; Prowl stepped forward in the same klik, holding up his servos.

"Anicon, please—" he pleaded tensely.

"Prowl doesn't want to go with you!" the compact cried. "He never wanted to be with you in the first place and you won't take him away from me!"

"Anicon!"

"_No_!"

The desperate wail loosened his tensors in a painful instant, injecting him with an acrid yellow impulse: Prowl jerked free from the musclecar's grip and stepped in front him, servos clenched at his sides.

The red sight jerked over his gold and black chassis with its ugly scar—the thing Anicon asked time and time again to let him fix—and he shook his head slowly when the scientist's mouth opened and worked soundlessly. A look of true, clear alarm overtook his fragile features as his only solace stood in the path of so dangerous a weapon, in front of so dangerous a mech. Valves catching, he tried to aim over the bike, to the side, but each time Prowl's perfect black-gold curvature lay too close to the jittery red circle to permit a killing burst.

Every step pointedly measured, as though absorbing with soft-grass cadence all the manic energy daggering out from the small, twisted form, Prowl walked slowly toward the gun, visor blank. The black mech called for him, at first growling, then snarling, but he couldn't break his visual link with the frantic scientist, holding his optics in place as though by a steel pin.

The closer he got, the more intensely Anicon shook, grip calcifying on the weapon until Prowl, three steps away, reached out and put his servo over the quivering nozzle; he finally decompressed as Anicon let him push the weapon down until it was pointed toward the ground. The compact's shoulder-plating slumped, jerking with his broken aspirations. He shuttered his optics and the tension bled out of him, tired mechanics giving a faint, stunned whine.

"Anicon."

When Prowl said his name, soft and calm and kind, the Elite crumbled, falling forward into his chassis with an anguished choke. Prowl, processor still running high and fast, unable to feel the grind of his own mechanics, silently reached down and untangled Anicon's digits from the trigger; the gun hit the ground. The scientist's freed digits clawed for his, winding their servos together with a desperate squirm.

He was nothing more than fragile white plating and polish, gutted of every complex failsafe. His Sparkchamber was seared, his processor voided. Pressing close, he murmured things against Prowl's chamber plating. They were mindless, desperate things, forced out of him in time to the pulse of Prowl's strong Spark, once more close to his own fluttering star. Keeping him online. He would die without him; all of the light would leave his circuitry and he would collapse into cold metal fragments.

They stood in silence and in false, trembling solitude for a long, long moment, Prowl's arm braced around the tiny model's waist. Retreating explosions peppered the unreality behind them; Anicon's too-warm, fervent pleas saturated the trapped air between them. Finally, Prowl shook his head, untangling their servos.

"P-Prowl?"

Anicon didn't move his face from the bike's neck, only pressing in closer. Prowl looked down, shuttering his optics for a moment.

"I do not deserve your kindness, Anicon, nor your friendship," he murmured at length, visor bent at a remorseful angle as he regarded the crest of Anicon's helm and his quivering, slicked-back antennae with a new sorrow.

"Wh-what… what do you—"

Prowl, a servo on each shoulder-plate, gently pressed him away, bringing crisp air between them. Anicon jerked and gasped as though the schism, the intrusion of something thicker and more final than air, pained him to his Spark. His servos scrambled for Prowl's narrow wrists, clinging tighter.

"Anicon," Prowl said softly. "I believe our… time is done."

"But… no. No, no." Anicon's head shot up, optics re-lighting in a messy panic. He searched Prowl's face desperately, whimpering, "Please don't. Don't say that."

"I am sorry."

"No. _No_. You… want to go with him? He--you can't!" he cried, tugging at the bike's wrists and looking fearfully over Prowl's shoulder at the spiked monster waiting with smoldering red optics and hard servos. "Look at him! H-he's evil! You d-don't know what he did to you!"

Anicon was not lying. In some way, he had never lied: one look into his feverishly bright optics proved, beyond a doubt, that he believed everything he was saying. His Spark sang true, no matter his words. Prowl shook his head again and opened his mouth to speak, but Anicon cut him off, clinging close and pressing his head into the crook of Prowl's neck again.

"You were h-h-happy. Here. You were h-happy with me and I—oh Primus, I kn-know I love you, Prowl. I love you more than a-a-anything," he pleaded, vocals weak and unsteady, stutter glitching in time with his wounded Spark. He dropped down to a whisper, rocking erratically on the tips of his rounded pedes. "I found you. It's fate that I found you in that terrible place. We were m-meant to be."

Prowl looked up into the white sky for a moment, inundated with the other's passionate anguish, and let it pass through his sore body like a sickness. He let Anicon hold him for a cycle longer then carefully drew away, steeling himself against the pained whimper the other gave as Anicon flinched and looked desperately into his visor.

"No: advanced connections and an expensive private investigator allowed you to find me," Prowl corrected him gently, weary of the youngling's sweeping, smothering sense of fantasy. He shifted his grip, prey to a sudden spurt of tenderness, or tremendous pity disguised as tenderness, as he reached up and held the little Elite's face, keeping their optics locked so Anicon could see, hopefully, that there was no malice in him. That this was something he needed to do. "I apologize. I will send you money until I can pay back what you sacrificed to liberate me. I will never forget your kindness, Anicon, nor all you attempted to do for me. If you are in need of a favor, let me be the one you call."

Anicon struggled with words, frantic coding compacted by the blank steadiness of the handsome bike's gaze, until he realized there was nothing to say. Nothing at all.

"Y-you can't," he whispered finally, cupping the servos over his face. Crumbling. "You just can't."

They stood with one another for so long—Prowl reluctant to draw away and break, in a single withdrawal of touch, so young and brilliant a mech—that both jerked when a heavy step fell behind them, followed by rough vocals.

"He can and he will."

Anicon's face warped into a whole new level of horror as the Decepticon reached for the elegant bike model, ugly face grim, and Prowl turned towards him, visor glowing an awe-struck teal. The younger mech, after a breathless moment, reached for him. The monster took his servo.

"C'mon, kid," he rumbled, vocals strangely strained. His huge digits curled around Prowl's wrist as though around a bird-bone, optics muted to a dark, raw red. "S'time I got you home."

Gentle dark servos slipped from a white face and they walked away.

Ani fell to his knees in the dirt with a stunned clank, shaking madly as Prowl abandoned him, so carefully, having made his decision with no small amount of fear. He moved toward the only source of truth he had felt; the musclecar's servo reached out to curl around his waist, wanting to push him toward the ship. Toward home.

Toward abuse, toward a filthy lifestyle and lies and cruel captivity, all over again. Back to blows and blackmail, to the slow crush of a mislead Spark when Prowl had had such a _chance to live the right way_. Every step taken, most of all, was a step away from _him_. Leaving him alone. Alone, when all he'd ever loved—all he ever wanted to do…

"Prowl!"

--was save him.

The shout hit Prowl like a blow. Stopping automatically and enduring the mech's wary growl, he turned, expecting Anicon to be crying out from a heaving crumple on the ground, for just one more embrace; instead, the tiny scientist was upright again, a fiery, deranged expression on his sweet face. He trembled for an instant then gave a death jerk, pointing and screaming:

"_Kill him_!"

Lockdown stared at the warped little model for a klik, a blank prickle skittering along the edge of his restored Spark—then turned and realized that Prowl was standing abnormally still as though caught mid-stride. His visor, turned toward him at mechanical attention, glowed an unnatural purple, beautiful slick black form radiating a cold, toothy energy. Something clicked far underneath his plating; echoed against his pristine, frozen insides. Lockdown's mouth opened.

He didn't have time to jerk away, didn't have time to curse; he grunted in shock as Prowl's fist plowed into his abdominal section, impact rattling him down to his pistons, followed by another and another and another. The musclecar threw himself to the side, flinging his arm out and blocking the last of the swift, vicious blows as his processor voided all the way down to his battle computer. In his flickering periphery, he saw his counterattack knock off one of those gaudy shoulder plates, leaving it swinging by a bolt. Prowl, visor thinned to a deadly purple sliver, reached up, ripped it off and, pausing for nothing more than a calculating glance, tore the flimsy gold-rimmed plating in half, producing two brittle, razor-sharp shards of enamel-slathered metal. One for each servo.

Regardless of what cold force was propelling him, he was just as clever as ever—and he had his order.

Entire body emitting a terrifying buzzing noise, Prowl flew at him; Lockdown, red optics wide and locked on the new weapons, raised an arm to block and balled his other servo, prepared to drive it into some slender portion of the bike's body. Knock him down, contain him without really hurting him. Not too much, but Prowl twisted and dug one black-gold razor into the gap underneath Lockdown's raised arm, severing a handful of thick, warm wires in one sinewy jerk and a throaty snap. Oil spurted over his forearms.

Lockdown roared, jolting to his knee, but when the ninjabot slithered close again, his functional fist smashed into Prowl's middle so hard his visor flickered. There was no recovery time, no wheezing, shuddering lag: the daggers were slashing at the air in front of Lockdown's face the next instant, forcing him up off the ground and away—away. Aspirating raggedly, he caught one of Prowl's wrists; his partner's elbow-joint rammed into his unprotected facial plating and he stumbled away just fast enough to get an ugly scrape across the front of his scalding chassis.

They fought, hard and furious, scrambling and slashing, Prowl's every move tight and precise and mechanical. Lockdown weathered blow after slicing blow—then, after a sudden, desperate stroke of genius, the old mech caught the possessed bike and crumpled the cheap armor at his vital joints with a wrenching squeal, immobilizing him for a precious second, then slammed his fist into Prowl's sharp jaw.

The bike's face snapped up, something vital fizzling inside of him. He almost lost consciousness—his visor flickered thickly, on and off and something slowed like syrup—then he lunged forward and buried one of the shards deep into the gap in Lockdown's black flank. Lockdown's neural net convulsed in searing pain and he cracked the little bike across the face in a gut reaction, finally _ending him_ in a crazed, crackling zap and a whoosh of electricity.

Finally, he was still. Still. In his arms like a doll, mouth split and bleeding. Spattered with oil.

Lockdown's intakes backed up with a wracking coughing noise, spattering glowing energon over Prowl's front. His hold on the ninjabot was slipping along with his control over his tensors; Prowl had gotten a few of them in the process, he knew hazily. He could feel the empty space where his sliced tensors, when flexed, fretted at two or three motionless metal digits. He lowered the bike to the ground, own knees giving as his processor stalled in delayed horror. He pressed his face dumbly to the kid's Spark chamber—to see if he'd really injured him, but no. It pulsed on. Still so close. Finally, so close. He shuttered his optics for an unreal moment, just experiencing the steady rhythm.

When he opened them, he saw Anicon.

He settled Prowl on the ground, left arm half numb and a little loose. He struggled to his pedes, oil spilling from his flank in a pained black spurt when his pressure dropped. The brat watched him with wide, blank optics, as motionless as Prowl before the _switch_, but when he started moving--when he was within ten spans and closing, servos hooked--Anicon snapped like a twig, some incendiary realization ripping through his tiny body, and screamed to the sky with his tiny servos clenched.

"How dare you! How _dare_ you!"

Four spans. Two spans. The toy pointing at him, optics flickering in insane, hopeless fury.

"I will _get you_. I will send every unit--"

He choked when Lockdown got in front of him, gripping the glitched little bastard by the neck and hoisting him up and slamming him against the compound wall with an echoing clang. His legs kicked. The old mech's digits contracted like his Spark had when Prowl flew at him, only this time much more creaking and metal and crunching of delicate, painful vocal components. Anicon gasped and arched numbly against the wall, erupting into panicked, ruined static after one particularly loud, wet crack from his throat.

Reaching back, motivated by nothing more than blind rage and revenge, Lockdown slammed his other servo—the claw—into the brat's tiny chassis, digging into the plating and into the wire-clotted cavity and wrenching to the side. Anicon screamed static, a horrific shudder daggering through his every component as something cracked deep inside of him, Spark convulsing and pushing outward in a panic.

Lockdown, in a hateful daze, pressed close to his wide, flickering cyan optics, heaving with every aspiration and bleeding out over the Elite's white plating; slathering his flawless pedes with thick oil. He just stared, witnessing the other's pain and scrounging for anything in his scorched processor, pressed close to the fitful little body as his life dribbled from the twisted metal gouge in his perfect white front.

"He ain't a toy. He ain't yours. He's his own and he's my partner," he rasped thickly, servo jerking as his pressure mechanism glitched from all the scrambled code flowing through his battered systems like sewage. Anicon twitched mechanically, Energon-bright mouth open. Lockdown unstuck his normal servo from the ruins of the little Elite's neck and leaned against the compound wall, sagging until his helm touched the metal, his energon-filled mouth brushing the scientist's audio unit.

"And you," he hissed. "You're gonna die."

He reared back in one last paroxysm of strength, prepared to rip the little monster's chamber straight from his chassis—then a loud, strict vocals blared from his left.

"Step_ away from the mech_."

Lockdown jerked, triggering another dribble of oil from the wound underneath his arm. Anicon scraped down the wall as he lost some of his grip. A blue, green and grey mech stood, bracing a vicious-looking black canon against the ground with storm-blue optics blazing. They stared each other down, even as Lockdown's sharp red optics began to lose resolution and his servo trembled in the ruins of the youngling's wet chassis.

Then, numbly, he let Anicon drop to the floor with a squeal of metal. The scientist hit with a clatter, frail form splayed on the fluid-wet ground, bent at all of his most delicate joints. His wide, wide optics flashed a dull, back-up blue in his round white face.

The mech did not shoot. Lockdown took a step away. Another.

When he was a good ten spans away, the Elite threw the canon to the ground and rushed to the broken, sputtering, sparking model and heaved him into his arms without a word, flat face wounded with tremulous horror as Anicon's head lolled to the side with a sharp sizzle. Watching them unwaveringly, Lockdown retreated like a black lion, backwards and with tense, booming steps; his engine growled malevolently as he bent and carefully bundled his Prowl into his mangled arms, consciousness wavering as that young blue-white Spark brushed his again. Reaching for him out of that warm body.

The Elite looked up at him, a flash of poisonous hatred crossing his flat face as he saw the old mech with the limp bike cradled against his intact chassis. Jerking movements sending a blurry jolt of panic through the musclecar, the other mech scooped the gutted youngling up and sprinted out of sight. Somewhere far off, the explosions had stopped.

Pain rendering him nearly blind, Lockdown turned and made his way with shaking steps through the forest and, now that he had the bike in his arms, back home.


	46. Away

* * *

Away

* * *

The airlock snapped open.

"What _happened_?! Why in Primus' name did you stop answering my commcalls, you _knew_ I was blind without you! When were you going to let me know what Pit was going on? I was out of R-39's by the time you signaled me and that damned mech just about stepped on my foxhole before he bo—_oh_."

Torque's shrill vocals shorted out with a throaty noise as Lockdown stumbled into the dimly lit bridge at a cripple's pace, Prowl's dark, limp body cradled against his scratched chassis. Dark oil formed a shining trail behind him, more heavy liquid bleeding and burbling down his sides with every movement. The old mech could taste the acidic energon rimming his mouth and spilling over his chin in dirty, glowing streaks, but all of his neural net function was tied up in his arms: around Prowl. Torque's yellow optics widened with a sharp electronic tone the second he came into the light and lurched against the wall for support. She clapped a servo to her mouth, old Spark contracting.

"Oh creator."

She rushed forward but stopped in front of the mangled mechs with a terrified expression, conflicted as to whom to touch or help first: Lockdown or the blank-visored bike, summoned from a hopeless void and spattered with the musclecar's fluids.

"Prowl. Oh, Prowler. You—you _found_--oh… oh my god," she moaned, reaching forward and up to run a servo over Prowl's long, slack face; the other pressed, shaking, against Lockdown's battered chassis. "What _happened_?"

Lockdown grunted thickly in response and rallied every fraying, dislocated component to push past the femme, coding almost binary in its dumb, rigid drive towards his workshop. He stumbled; Torque, with a sharp exclamation, got under his bad arm and led his mammoth, suspension-shot weight the rest of the way. Her tight, tiny grip steadied him as he laid Prowl down on one of the level tables with a clumsy clunk. Then he wrenched himself around and nearly slipped on his own fluids—there was a jerk and a metal-metal screech and a grunt from Torque as his equilibrium chip flooded his stabilizers with correction feed, all of it lost underneath the blaring red warning signals clotting his periphery.

Limping past Torque, he got to the control station on the bridge and leaned heavily on it with a painful creak. Rebooted her. Punched at buttons and led her up. Up and away and fast—regardless if the brat wouldn't pursue. He was scrap now. The femme stood behind him, servos pressed hard against her chamber plating as if to quell the panicked palpitations underneath.

"Lockdown. Lockdown, you're—" she whispered as Moot passed the atmosphere barrier with a muffled roar and a pressure-drop, finding no words for the slop and spatter of dark and glowing fluids; for the fact that he was still standing after doing the impossible: finding his partner.

"Boot up the EMP generator. The big one," he rasped, failing optics locked on the main screen as his CPU strained to come up with a place they would be safe. White coordinates, one by one, made it onto the destination field.

"But—your servo," Torque protested. "You can't possibly repair yourself. You… you can't even reach your own side—we need someone else."

If it were his servo, replacing it wouldn't have been a problem: his arm and all the vital circuitry that drove those interchangeable servos was another matter entirely. Lockdown finished typing, mashing his dead digits into keys out of habit, then looked over his spiked shoulder at her, fizzling audio units and half-dead optics conveying a rash of things that made Torque's sharp facial plating void in a new rush of fear.

"No," she gasped. "I can't do that. You know I can't. I can hardly replace a fuel line on my own, I can't—"

The hard thing was, it wasn't a lie to escape responsibility: Torque was murderously inept at anything medical.

The Cybertronian body was awesomely complex, yet nothing more than a churning, mathematical sum of cold components—something the old femme didn't care to face after such a long life, even if she didn't have the processor for such meticulous learning. Lockdown wasn't an expert, but he knew enough to keep himself online. It seemed stupid, therefore, that he should place his existence in the hysterically shaking servos of a femme who wouldn't know her crankshaft from her exhaust pipe, but he trusted her—and his internal pressure was dropping fast. Setting Moot on autopilot, Lockdown turned and trudged toward the back of the ship again, Torque at his heels.

"I'll tell you what t'do. Stop your… screamin' and get the EMP generator," he growled haltingly, then stopped at the shop doorway with a wheeze of abused mechanics, expression haggard and ugly. He shook his head. "No. First, get stasis cuffs on him."

"_What_?"

Torque, knotted in confusion, looked past him and into the shop. Prowl, helpless and cold in the dark, lay just in sight, slender body flung across the farthest table. Victim. Prize. Beloved. He should be in the larger mechs arms again, the very black-lacquered proof that all that pain and madness had been worthwhile, but--

"Get a pair of fraggin' stasis cuffs from the back and slap them on him," Lockdown snapped, deep vocals shorting as an odd step sent a spasm of pain through him. "He did this to me and I don't want him t'reboot with full use of his arms. Just _do it_."

She couldn't possibly think about what it meant, not when the mech muscled himself onto the extraction table and went unnervingly still, bad arm dropping to the side. She, as ordered, retrieved a pair of stasis cuffs and bent back some of that mangled metal foil-scrap around Prowl's—_Prowl's_—joints so she could bind his wrists together. The cuffs clicked shut, blue flashing twice; the beautiful little bike flinched from the dark of stasis then lay motionless again, energon drying on his thin lips.

It was impossible that he was there with them: she had given up hope of ever seeing him again and her Spark, aching sweetly, wanted nothing more than to crush him close to her and prove he was real, but not with Lockdown in such a state—not with those nonsensical cuffs twisting the young bike into an unnatural position. She hurried away from his blank face and back to Lockdown, who stirred at her touch and, optics flickering fitfully, pointed at a tube-tourniquet and began to explain how to make solder.

He led her through, step by step, raspy vocals crushed to a pained croak. His motor ground unsteadily, his gruff articulacy fading as the EMP threatened to wipe him into hard stasis with every honeyed buzz—he had her turn it off after the first few foggy cycles. She still flinched every time he growled and jerked, her oil-slick digits slipping on the raw, sparking edges of his mangled peripheral circuitry.

Her servos shook the entire time: he weathered several of her panicked outbursts and some thrown tools, but a few cruel threats to ground her and she did all right. Within two megacycles, all of his fuel lines and energon tubes had been reconnected and his tensors were patched. He wasn't nonoperational, just hooked up to an energon siphon and in an unimaginable amount of pain--and that was a start.

Shouldn't have given him the chance. Shouldn't have given anyone a chance to get at him like this.

Torque bit into him about it, the instant it was obvious he wasn't going to go offline under her servos. She was hysterical about the whole thing anyways—Elites and all and Prowl besides that. Said he should have just knocked Prowl out and carried him away without arousing the slightest bit of ruckus or resistance. He'd sworn to do it, just to make her clam up and come along. It was easier to haul a body away than explain things, true, but once he actually got close to Prowl… staying hidden wasn't a choice.

He had to touch: it was too much just to strike him and steal him away, limp and heavy. After so long without him, he was starving for a syllable, a connection, a Spark pulse from _his Prowl_. He wasn't that patient, he couldn't _wait_ even if it was the smarter thing to do. A stellar-cycle thinking he was offline or tortured, only to have him in front of his optics, healthy, visor blazing bright… that did not make for smart. It made for dumb urges and needs and Spark-clouded insanity and his arm jerking out before he could register it. Just to end that void.

That, and he had to know if it was the brat. The sniveling Elite. It couldn't have been anyone else: he'd had the sinking, blistering feeling when he traced the coordinates from the commcall and when he saw the planet and that double-doored mansion he _knew_, but… things had snowballed.

They were in trouble, Lockdown knew. Both of them.

He'd survived this long by never explicitly pissing off the Elite Guard. Scrapping one of their young, no matter how glitched and pathetic, wouldn't go unpunished: they protected their own, accomplished and ill-bred alike. If he was 'wanted' before, he'd been upgraded to 'demanded' the second he tried to rip the chamber out of the little compact. Briefly, he wished a screaming place in the Pit on the little bastard, then sat up on the table as Torque tied off the last of the wires on his side. He flexed his arm experimentally. It was weak—he could feel the strain at the seams where she'd over-cooked his tensors--but it would do until he got to Tipper. It would have to.

Torque, despite her concern, wasn't looking at him anymore: her exhausted gaze had shifted beyond him, to the motionless bike model on the far table. He said her name. She looked at him blankly, startled, then truly seemed to see him—him and all of the injuries she had just patched, his damaged facial plating and grim mouth--and her expression decayed into something unimaginably sad and uncomprehending.

"What do you…mean, he did this to you?" she asked softly, helping him off the table.

"Just what I said," Lockdown grunted after his pedes hit the floor. His stabilizers fritzed and he grit his dentals against the rush of nausea… and what he was saying. He could hardly sort through it himself. "Some sorta… overlay program. That little glitch 'probly had it tailor-made for him. He gave the order and the kid attacked me. Had to fight back."

That much was fact. Hard fact, that the first real touch between them had been blows instead of tense, scraping caresses, but what came before the fight stalled the old mech. Prowl had hesitated. Actually stopped. Even from the commcall, he knew something was strange with his partner, like some sort of substructure itch. Something, missing or present, was dicking with him. Pit, something _had_ to be strange after every level of the Pit he'd traversed, but if Prowl had recognized him, _felt_ him… why hadn't he come along?

Probably more inhibitor slag. He'd get it wiped out of him. He'd fix it. Fix it all.

"Oh, Lockdown."

He looked down: Torque was running her digits over the vicious gouges and scrapes in his plating, gazing up at him with a wounded expression—as though she felt just as intensely as he did the inability to scoop the slender model against his hollow chassis at first sight. To have to slam him down and crack a servo across the face he'd missed so intensely, mauling the very thing he'd come so far to find. He shook his head.

"Would've slagged me otherwise," he grunted. Hard as he'd punched, however, Lockdown was certain he hadn't knocked the program out of the ninjabot. It was still in there, burning a hole through Prowl's processor. He gestured behind him. "Don't touch the cuffs. We can't take them off him 'till we know what's what. He could wake up swingin'."

"A… all right. I understand."

Lockdown's blank vocals put a fear of the future into the old femme: it was the first time her extrapolation drive reached past the nearly nauseating physical relief of having the youngling back by their side. She could only imagine how horrified Prowl would be upon rebooting. Being forced to attack one's lover: it was a pain only rivaled by being forced to subdue someone being led against their will. Her old Spark riled briefly—the thought of stealing anyone's free will set her ablaze, much less so near and dear a soul—but exhaustion and the resumed weight of Lockdown's arm across her shoulder-plating compressed the feeling into something more desperate than relief.

"You need to recharge," she told her friend, gentle but firm, noticing the uneasy look the musclecar was dealing his returned partner. Lockdown nodded hesitantly, barely able to focus his optics after such a surgery: the pain lay heavy in his neural net, clustering around his injuries and interfering with his basic functions. He needed quiet, needed recharge, or else he was going to crash. Hard.

"Get him settled," he said roughly, forcing his optics away from his partner's blank face.

"I will."

* * *

Returning from leading Lockdown to his berth, Torque lifted Prowl into her tough arms, finally allowed a plate-scraping validation of the Spark that still burned brightly within him. Its clean, steady frequency thrummed outward, essentially undamaged by the black, pain-fraught light-years that had separated him from his partner for so long. Young ones—so resilient in the face of a spiritual injury that had hammered into Lockdown's aged center, leaving him flickering and sick.

But it was no worry, given time. Prowl would heal his partner. He could do nothing else, given his love.

Even his weight was beautiful, solid and polished. Oh, but she couldn't wait to see him online—the precious quirk of his visor, his demure hand gestures and small smiles. Overcome by the glowing little life in her arms, perfectly crafted and whirring gently, Torque hugged him tightly, then carried him to his room. Clearing his scuffed armor from his berth and into a corner, she laid Prowl in its place. Carefully, she peeled all of the crumpled ornamental armor from his body and placed it aside, revealing a simple black bike where he should be. Last, she removed the strange decorative helmet and smoothed her servo over his golden horns, placing a kiss on his helm.

"Welcome home, darling," she whispered against the glossy metal. She shuttered her optics, overcome, and smiled reverently. "You have no idea how you were missed."

* * *

A few megacycles spent in fitful recharge did nothing for him—or just wasn't enough. His first megacycle was solid, but his sensory field was still so hot, run ragged by phantom stimuli and twinges of pain from his sliced wires, that he jerked up and out of recharge more times than he could count. Saturated with urgency, grasping for something.

He didn't have to ask what. He'd waited for a stellar-cycle, clawing through galaxies with no relief. Regardless of his wreck of a body, he couldn't wait any longer--not when the dark of the room made it seem like they were leagues apart again. Needed to make sure he was still there, steady frequency and all.

Heaving himself upright, Lockdown limped out of his room; he passed Torque, curled in his navigator chair, in deep recharge herself. Her masculine servos were still smeared with oil, twined underneath her chin. The space outside was velvet black, still and heavy, and they moved through it like a dust mote.

He creaked to a halt outside the kid's door, Spark lurching at what he was going to walk in on. Prowl on his berth. Like always.

Prowl, in his room again, filling that space: already the raw edges in the room were beginning to seal up for the bounty hunter. The heelcaps and that damned tree—possessions, not remnants. Lockdown muscled down an involuntary shudder as the switch hit him, some sort of gratitude too frenzied to be real, then opened the door to a filled room, not a mausoleum.

It was dark. Prowl lay on the berth, sprawled like Torque had probably left him. He might not have even booted up yet. Substructure finally loosening, Lockdown made his slow way towards him and stopped beside the metal slab, reaching out to touch some part of his little partner. His digits nicked a shoulder-plate--and it clattered, falling to the floor. Servo freezing alongside his engine, Lockdown's red optics widened in the dark.

"Lights," he growled.

The lights flickered on; there was nothing on the berth but a pile of the crushed armor and his original mods, arranged in a vague body shape. The cuffs were on the floor, cracked clean open. Lockdown was allowed no more than a flash before the lights went off again, and a tense groan escaped through his gritted dentals.

No matter the circumstances, his partner was skilled—very, very skilled. The bounty hunter's aching tensors snapped tight and he turned slowly, every gear clicking as his optics scanned the room.

"Kid?"

Before he could say it again, a dense weight slammed into his back with enough force to send his weakened body to the floor. He hit with a jarring clang and snarled, thrashing to unseat the expert grip around his waist; a servo clawed under his throat, wrenching his face up, and something long and thick was jammed against his chassis, right above his palpitating Spark.

It was a pipe, wrenched from the ventilation along the side of his room. Clever bastard.

"Struggle and I will not hesitate to put you offline."

Prowl's steely vocals sounded right in his auditory unit, nimble digits latching onto the edge of his facial plating. The severed pipe squeaked against his plating, the cold strength behind it threatening to send a pole through his chassis and chamber in one crunch.

"You will release me immediately."

Lockdown winced, able to do little more then draw in a slow breath through his half-open intakes as his insides roiled.

"Put it down, Prowl," he rumbled as slowly as he could. "It's me."

He felt Prowl stiffen over his shoulders, blue-white Spark flaring in shock against his spiked back and eliciting a pained expression as the energy flare punched through the plating to maul Lockdown's deprived old star. The musclecar wasted no time talking: reaching back, he heaved the bike off of him and straight over his helm, sending him and his weapon clattering to the floor in a metal cacophony. Lockdown went down to his servos and knees, not bothering getting to his pedes. His light intake and resolution was so mangled he could see no more than Prowl's wide, bright blue visor opposite him, a spooked butterfly blur. Glaring up, he huffed:

"Lights."

The ship didn't respond. He said it again: there was nothing silence, rebellious and cold, and the scrape of plating as Prowl moved in the dark. Temper ripping through him, goaded by the aching flaccidity of his tensors and the one he'd snapped tugging Prowl over and the stupid femme's dumb obedience to the kid, he screeched toward the crouching bike, optics blazing.

"Damnit, kid, turn the lights on!" he barked.

Prowl drew in a shuddering breath, bundled just a tender black span away from the bounty hunter.

"Lights."

It was nothing more than a hushed, numb whisper, but the room lit up regardless. Lockdown was left stranded in the middle of the floor, aspirating raggedly, with his partner staring at him so blankly that it made his Spark jump. The old mech readjusted his optics, looking steadily at the other mech. Waiting for the shift. Waiting for the rush, the recognition.

It didn't come.

"Prowl."

It was like talking to the ship: the dark remained, dense and immovable. His name, rasped again, provoked nothing more than a helpless widening of his visor.

"Who are you?" the bike murmured, one servo clenched absently over his chamber.

Lockdown's watery Spark quivered so hard he swore his girders warped in the mournful, nauseating burst of energy. He kneeled there for a long, excruciating moment, waiting for a change—pressing for something more, he _needed something more_, but Prowl's timorous wonder, the most horrible thing he'd ever seen, remained. Burning into him.

Nothing.

Rising to his feet in a hasty, stung lurch, Lockdown strode out. The door locked behind him, leaving the frozen bike alone in the light. A huge oily servo-print marred his floor, smeared so it appeared it was clawing for a golden-horned helmet that lay only a few feet away.

* * *

Torque jerked out of recharge the moment Lockdown stumbled out of the hallway, already sick with worry. The bounty hunter stood in front of her for a moment as though he didn't know which direction to go in his small cage of a ship, clenching and reclenching his servos to quell the swelling tremble in his battered chassis. Lockdown stared vacantly out into space for a moment, finding the words. She watched him, optics widening in the wake of his breathless silence—and knew what was wrong before he even spoke.

"They wiped him."

It wasn't Prowl in that room.


	47. Captive Again

A/N: Thanks SO MUCH to Christy who, like, fixed the messed-up emotions in here XD Yay help!

Okayso. This is my last fanfic offering before taking off to (internet-barren) Europe for a week, guys and gals :3 Sorry to leave you in another unresolved situation, and besides that, I don't know when I'll be able to get the next chapter out… Busy busy. Enjoy the first bits of summer!

* * *

Captive Again

* * *

It took them an inordinately long time to convince Prowl they weren't going to harm him.

Lockdown did nothing—could do nothing—more than stare into space with half-lit optics, so it was up to his old friend to venture to the storage closet and abide Prowl's icy, suspicious glare, always offering a few soft words and a cube of energon with each visit. She tried not to feel too much like a captor while placing it on the floor a non-threatening distance away, then listened mournfully for steps once the door shut. Just to know that he wasn't wanting for anything or denying himself anything. She already envied the functional, ignorant touches she'd managed beforehand, now that the silent bike wouldn't let the two 'bots anywhere near him.

Three solar-cycles passed in this detestable tension and closed-door silence before she managed to bring Lockdown into the room. They had to repair him, she explained. The young mech had been holding his chin at a strange angle and Lockdown knew full well, even as Prowl attempted to hide his weakness with a horribly _prepared_ glare and a flurried click-click-click of readjusting tensors, that he didn't escape the fight without a few stripped gears and snapped wires.

But when Lockdown came into the cramped room and reached for the bike, Prowl jerked away, nearly flattening himself to the wall in an effort to get away from the strange green and black mech. Lockdown's servo twitched and he withdrew it as though burned, optics flashing red. They stared at each other, each locked down to their last quivering gear.

"I would feel more comfortable if she did this," Prowl finally muttered, vocals as cold as the black void outside the ship. Lockdown growled at the bottom of his vocalizer, huge claw clenching and unclenching. Torque stepped forward helplessly; feeling the wave of stinging disbelief from the bigger mech, she was prepared to say anything to let the bounty hunter touch his partner in any way.

"Darling, I'm not—"

The musclecar cut her off with a bark of his motor, turning and jamming the tools into her servos. Half of them clattered to the floor. She stooped to pick them up and Lockdown glared at the lithe model at the back of the tiny storage room, seething down to his battered old Spark.

"F'that's the way he wants it."

He led her through step by step, just like before, grunting each order from a purposeful five feet away. Torque looked back with an apologetic expression as she did whatever needed doing, carefully patching wire-casings and replacing a tiny gear with her inexperienced, clunky servos. Prowl sat at attention, flinching whenever she prodded too far into his neural net or let a tool slip—but most of all, he avoided Lockdown's perpetual stare with a cold determination.

That half-megacycle of hostile disregard and _distance_ drilled into the older mech, only worsening the frustrated smolder of his core. Back on that planet, there was no time to think about anything more than getting Prowl away and back on the ship, back next to him. His physical presence alone was enough to make Lockdown forget himself. There was _no time_ to truly reconcile any strange, unnatural behavior that might lead, with logic, to another messy personal cataclysm, but now? Lockdown placed the terrifying something he'd seen when he first rescued Prowl: beneath the shock and the wonder, the little mech had looked at Lockdown like he had never seen him before in his life. Everything else about his partner had fit, if the 'bot seeing it was desperate enough—and he had been. The way he'd talked down the Elite brat, the way he'd looked at him… he had to see Prowl in the little bike, to reward the pain. But no.

There were no absolutes, however. In a way, this mech was Prowl—certainly _a_ Prowl. Just not his Prowl.

"Where am I?"

When Prowl finally did look at him, neck mechanics patched and sealed up again, it was so hostile a glare that Lockdown himself had to look away, crossing his wiry damaged arms and leaning against the wall.

"Told you. My ship."

The musclecar recognized that sneer, all the way back from Earth. Yes, it was still Prowl. Just younger, snottier, scared as all Pit and desperate not to appear vulnerable. Unwelcome as the caricature was, it meant his personality programming was still intact, which was good… but that also meant they had to deal with this Prowl, who had a severe deficit of patience and trust. That answer, an old one, didn't seem to suit the bike very well. He continued his icy interrogation, ignoring Torque as she gathered the last of the tools from around his gold-trimmed pedes.

"Where are you taking me?"

"Ain't like that, kid. No final destination—if there is one, you're standin' in it." Prowl's expression did not change: if anything, his long face became more suspicious, visor thinning. Pricked at the sight, Lockdown pushed himself from the wall with a creak of abused tensors and ground out, "Quit lookin' at me like that. If I was gonna strip you for spare parts, I'da done it a century and a half ago."

Lockdown knew he was graceless, or accepted it and forgot about it most times, but the look Prowl gave him went far beyond disgust or horror. The void between them widened another mile. Lockdown turned and cursed at the bottom of his vocals, sneering halfheartedly. Just being near the other mech set him to jittering: higher functions, like analyzing his words, weren't on the list. He wasn't good at feeling this way—this much—this strongly, even if half of it was sour and impatient. He heard Torque trying to comfort the kid, patching his stupid move.

"What he means is… you're safe. I promise you, we are not going to hurt you."

"And I appreciate this," Prowl grit out impatiently. "But I would accept even pain if it meant you would reveal yourselves quickly and in full. You have much to explain."

Torque looked up at her friend warily, searching for any sign that he knew how to proceed, but it was unnecessary. He knew as well as she did that he was technically, due to Prowl's skewed mentality, dealing with a captive. Lockdown blew hot air through his vents, creating an aggravated hiss.

"A'right. Where d'you want me to start?" he growled through his gapped dentals, scratched facial plating contracting and buckling in intense uneasiness. Prowl took another moment to study the half-hunched mech, thinned visor lingering judgmentally on the spiked shoulder-plating, evilly-marked face and the blank sigil on his monstrous chassis.

"Who are you?"

To his credit, Lockdown did not flinch. He'd heard that one before.

"I'm Lockdown. That's Torque."

"And?" Prowl prompted harshly when he did not continue. Lockdown's frown deepened. He didn't want to start from the beginning, but the ninjabot's stony glare allowed him no escape.

"M'a bounty hunter. You're my partner."

"You are making this far more difficult than it has to be."

The disdain in Prowl's vocals was painful enough, but it was so difficult to find words. The words, any words. Especially when denied, so vehemently, the one kind of explanation or connection he could manage—physical—it was painful to summarize his existence with the quiet, smirking bike into the concrete, like scattered jobs and events, when so much had passed between them in the time between. It had never been said in the first place, how to grind it down to syllables in the face of this glaring, damaged cynic?

"It's… complicated," Torque began gently, seeking only to fill the silence and distract the exacting blue knife from cutting her battered musclecar to his girders. "You didn't… no, you were a very—"

"Found you on a backwater planet. Took you up, trained you a little. We do the job. Do it right besides that." Lockdown shrugged, visual field trained on the opposite wall as he kept his vocals monotone. "You took a likin' to it. Nothin' else to say."

Besides the fact that Prowl had disappeared one day and ripped his life apart. Besides the fact the bike made the old musclecar whole and he'd never stopped searching. Not once.

He was still searching, even with Prowl right in front of him.

"Rather bare for a century and a half of material," Prowl commented scornfully, motor snorting. Lockdown stiffened as though struck, then wound down with a bitter smirk.

"So you want stories," Lockdown chuckled, rough and uneven. He looked up with a spiteful glint in his optics. "I can give you a few. What about your Elite? You wanna hear about him?"

That was it. What he had been waiting for.

Prowl stiffened, visor brightening a shade, trying simultaneously not to show his interest even as it locked every limb—if interest, nauseous and destructive, was even the word. Perhaps he needed proof that Anicon ever existed to another mech, outside his own closed world. He was such a fragile, elaborate and damaged creature, he seemed almost mythical and, as involved as they had been before, Prowl's current life could not exist in some small part without white Anicon, soft and stuttering.

"I'll tell you," Lockdown said, grinding his dentals briefly with the mad anticipation of one about to achieve some sort of small, crushing revenge. "He was a job of ours, stellar-cycles back on an Umalian Federation planet. The little slagger was running screaming from Irtens, leaking oil all the way. His papabot hired us to rescue him. He took a liking to you—you didn't care—and decided he wanted you. He tracked us a thousand light-years just to try and get a 'face out of you, then wanted to hire you as a pet bodyguard. You told him to shove it and came back to me. That's it."

The story would have been crude enough without the mech's barbarian vocals and goading glare. Prowl's Spark flickered, servos tightening into fists.

"Ridiculous," he hissed without thinking, even as he knew Anicon was a helpless romantic, a destructive romantic, and tracking someone so far after a chance meeting sounded like something he would do. The amount the Elite had paid for him spoke of that same sweeping affectation and the facts, the facts lined up somewhat: words and situations stuck out with chilling clarity, the base for an obsessive jigsaw in the processor of a mech who simply could not lie outright… Prowl could already see the patterns he followed to embellish, to sweeten, to cast in a gauzy, wishful light--

"And what fairy tale'd he tell you?" Lockdown croaked viciously, bringing the young, lost bike back to the cramped, dark ship and the ugly mech in front of him. The magenta femme stood slightly to the side, watching him just as carefully. Prowl opened his mouth to protest—what, he did not know—but what the bounty hunter's story lacked in length and details, it made up for in brutal honesty. He could defend it to a fault and it showed in his vocals and steadiness of gaze—something Anicon had never claimed. Lockdown leaned forward, creaking.

"How's it compare, kid?"

"He deceived me, that I know," Prowl ceded coldly, once more looking aside in some shadow of anxiety. "I simply do not know to what extent."

"Alright. Now you know."

"Untrue—all I have is your word and that is nothing," Prowl spat. Lockdown glared at the young mech, radiating all of the caustic arrogance and frigidness one frame could hold, and waited in silence across the room. He couldn't have known that that selfsame distance was all that saved Prowl from himself: now that the breathless, injured pull of his old Spark was no longer distracting the young bike to madness, Prowl was capable of sweet, cold rationalization.

His trust—his feelings--had never been rewarded before. Anything but logic was not an option. He would find the truth, not feel it.

"Wouldn't lie to you," the bounty hunter rumbled, skull-like face averted as he worried at his mutilated thigh-plating with thick digits.

"You say this, but anyone is capable of words. What evidence—_evidence_--do I have that you are not deceiving me just as he did?"

Lockdown hissed and straightened and searched for reasons in his singed processor; reasons Prowl should trust him despite the contextual oblivion of his seared memory core, despite his previous manipulation. He started to point them out, because they were physical things like his armor and his datapad and that damned tree and those heelcaps, things Torque had already showed him, but Prowl cut him off, vocals rising fitfully.

"In fact, how do I know that Anicon lied at all? His story seemed probable enough. His family unit was certainly more reputable than two deep-space drifters with undeclared allegiances." The ninjabot's digits fretted at the scar around his chassis, visor thinning to a scalding teal knife. "How can I be the slightest bit certain that you did not keep me here against my will for stellar-cycles, using me as you saw fit, only to sell me to a slavery circuit once I became unnecessary?"

Prowl hardly finished speaking before Lockdown turned and slammed his servo into the nearest wall, sending a jarring pulse through the room to rival that which had just ripped him in two. He ground brutally into the metal as though someone were pinned beneath his fist, horror and denial and rage pulsating from his half-crumpled frame. The idea of so much life, the best of his grubby, lengthy existence, soured into some sort of fragged-up, poisoned hostage situation crushed his verbal capacity as nothing else could. The idea of Prowl against his will, even when straining against his chassis—manipulative Elite bastard. Sparkless, sick little _cretin_.

Backed against the wall of the berth, Prowl recoiled in spite of himself, true fear of the black mech's strength shaking him to his comparatively fragile girders. The femme watched and waited, shaking as he didn't dare to, with one servo out. When Lockdown unstuck his huge fist from the wall, he stood rasping for a moment, then shook his head as though stunned.

"This is damaged," he ground out thickly. "Ain't doin' this."

He turned and made to walk out. He hated talking in circles, hated _talking_, especially when Prowl—that Prowl, not his Prowl--wasn't willing to listen. He'd poisoned him, the little slagger had _poisoned_ him right down to his blue Spark. Torque said something bewildered and fearful, so he raised his vocals and snarled, "Said I ain't doin' this. Useless. Get him on the fraggin' bridge."

She made a _noise_ and scrambled after him.

"But we--we have to get his consent first, his firewalls—"

"I don't care if you have to cuff him again, this is gonna end here!"

"Lockdown!"

"What are you talking about?"

They stopped at the door, turning back to see Prowl half-kneeling on his berth, watching the sudden uproar tensely. His visor was wide, piteously wide, as though the threat he had feared for solar-cycles had finally come upon him.

"You want proof? I got proof," Lockdown growled, gripping the doorway; his dented servo squeaked. "All the goddamned proof you'll ever need. Just get up and follow me to the bridge. _Now_."

"What type of proof?" the bike asked tensely, still frozen.

"Encrypted data, stored on the ship's hard drive. Your memory. All of it, all the way back to when you were Sparked."

Silence.

"Impossible," Prowl breathed, the fierce, desperate thrill of his core vibrating even on his outermost plating.

"Put my Spark on it, now get up or I'll drag you in there myself," the musclecar threatened him, throwing off the femme's weak restraint efforts and taking a step toward him. Prowl got off the berth stood up, Spark pulsating hard and fast, frenzied current reaching down to his pedes and digits.

"My memories—in this ship? How did they come to be here?"

"You downloaded them every other stellar-cycle for a century and a half, just like me. I made you do it, in case of somethin' like this. Or a knock to the core." The older mech stilled and stared tensely into a corner, rushed with his own memories, then grunted, "Didn't wanna lose you."

"We wanted to talk to you before we offered. It will… all of this will make much more sense if you let us give you your memories back," Torque said huskily, as though every moment he refused the transfer injured her deeply. "We have no reason to lie to you. We want what you want: your happiness. Please."

Prowl stared uncomprehendingly at her, one servo to his chamber-plating as though stifling a stunned twisting of his insides, orchestrated by his keening center. Something shone in the bike, a frantic glimmer of indecision and clarity and conflict, that they had been hoping for since he rebooted. Lockdown watched him carefully, own substructure horrifically tight, as though his very future rested on the confused young mech.

Prowl aspirated and looked down, to the scar around his chassis and the Autobot sigil beside it. The two 'bots knew exactly what he wanted, somehow. An identity. The thought of it: memories of himself as a profotorm. Since he had altogether given up hope of ever regaining his memories at all, even the most recent ones, it was too perfect. How could anything be this perfect?

He had a memory, once, like this feeling. It was a burning glimpse of something irretrievable: that of his Spark expanding from its wounded ball in a crisp surge of energy, leaping towards the black mech's own star in that single moment of pure belonging. But much like how that precious, illogical memory had faded and cooled in the small, airtight crucible of his storage-closet prison after solar-cycles of silence, Prowl came to himself.

He did not know these 'bots. They could be anyone. Anyone could stage anything, anyone could _act_, and memory-file transfers were permanent. Who knew what the download was—or what else was packaged along with it? His servos tightened into fists, shakily voiding the air from his cavernous chassis as his Spark flared erratically. Fighting his higher processes.

"No."

"What?"

The growl was from Lockdown; the only other sound was a soft clank as Torque pressed her servos to her mouth.

"_No._ I am through with being… fit into lives and I will not submit to a file-transfer unless an Alpha-level scan is run on the intended contents." His dull vocals drilled into Lockdown, as did the stern, appraising look as he crossed his arms, once more _withdrawing_. "If you cannot provide this…"

"What do you think this is, a fraggin' Prime-tailored medbay?"

"Lockdown," Torque murmured warily as he took a loud step toward the young mech, fists in front of him.

"Best I have is—best _anyone_ around here has is Gamma-level and you'll be damn happy for it."

"Then absolutely not."

Lockdown struggled with the lethal refusal as one did a viciously tight bond, digging his digits into his spiked neck and twisting and clenching, black and white facial plating contorting gruesomely. He shuttered his optics tightly, flinching as the old femme's servos found his arm; his engine rattled with a shrill, sick whine.

"This is your _life_, kid," he burst out, vocals cracking.

"Or yet another ploy," Prowl hissed, unmoved.

They could have offered to download some of their own memories of him, but it was not an option. Prowl's look—his echoing feel—said that he was incapable of trusting freely anymore. He was a barricaded soul, indifferent to any entreaty but logic. What was more, they couldn't force it on him: like Torque tried to say, if he threw up his firewalls, they couldn't download anything into him even if he was in stasis.

It was a dead-end comparable to what Lockdown experienced in the underground warehouse: it was as though he were heavy with cooling energon again, facing a dark wall miles underground. There was no way forward; the despair almost overwhelmed his blurry red Spark. When he finally spoke, slow and unsteady, his vocals were nothing more than a dark croak.

"Then what're we gonna do with you, Autobot?"

"You may… take me to Cybertron," Prowl answered curtly, looking away. "Someone there will know me."

Lockdown almost laughed. Almost.

"Don't think so. We ain't exactly popular on Cybertron."

Prowl glared at him, visor angled in a mixture of confusion and contempt.

"Then you may transfer m—"

"Me, her and you, kid. You can't go back," Lockdown snorted, weathering the bike's outraged expression with nothing more than a shake of his head. "According to the big bolts, you're either offline or a traitor—neither of which they'd welcome back with open arms, much less a few questions and a pair of stasis cuffs. Unless you want to go in the stockades or the scrapheap, you're with us."

Prowl's mouth opened, a myriad of expressions flickering over his long face as he fought—denied, violently—the dull honesty of the other mech's words. In one sentence, an entire world was cut off from him. It didn't fit, it couldn't fit; not with the sigil on his front nor what he knew of himself. He grit his dentals, jarring his blank processor.

"But—Anicon—"

"Did he ever show you to any of his Elite buddies?" Lockdown demanded sharply, shutting the young mech's mouth from ten feet away. "He ever let you outta the house?"

No. No, his existence had been ridiculously contained: he had not seen another sentient 'bot besides Anicon and his guardian since rebooting so many months ago. A cloister, a separate world. He shook his head, optics flickering behind his visor.

"No. Never."

"Believe me, kid, you were big enough that anybody who had anything t'do with the military would've recognized your model and had you scanned down to your last nanobyte. I destroyed your tags a long time ago, in case you ever were captured, so they'd have to get into your memory banks to actually accuse you of anything. But your Elite? Bet he didn't let you see anyone because he knew they'd take you away from him anyways. 'Probly pull your plug."

It was impossible, but his isolation--the way Tinus glared in passing at his very framework, as though there were something irredeemably suspicious about him—suddenly made terrifying sense. He was never allowed to see another 'bot and every detail was taken care of: from what he understood, even the Direct Command surgery at Cybertron was to be extremely private and controlled. If he escaped as planned, groping through the streets of his home planet, thinking himself a true Autobot and a blameless soul… would he truly have been helped? Or canned and catalogued as a traitor for something he did not even remember doing?

But… what in Primus' name had he done?

"This… cannot be my life," Prowl murmured haltingly, slumped against the wall. His servo slid from his scar to his sigil, tracing the edges as though it—he—was unreal and incomprehensible. A nauseating alienation dribbled down his insides, cutting his palpitating Spark off from his treacherous black exostructure. "I am an Autobot. I am… a warrior for my cause."

"There is no _cause_. Just us. You're a bounty hunter. You're my partner." Lockdown stared him down, wide mouth twitching into a weak sneer. "S'been good enough for you for a century and a half."

"… I am a traitor?" Prowl whispered after a long silence, low vocals quivering.

"Technically," Lockdown grunted. Another dense silence followed. The young mech did nothing but sit and stare, gaze falling to his sigil and the fearful Spark that beat nearby, trapped underneath his black plating. He went somewhere outside of himself, only returning when he pressed so hard at the clean red Autobot sigil that it cracked. Seeing the fracture through the blessed symbol that was echoed in his very coding, Prowl made a horrified noise and pushed himself up and off the berth, aspirating raggedly.

"No. _No_. This is not my life!" he cried, servos out and clawed into the ship's dark air. "I am loyal, I am not a traitor! I would not stoop so low!"

"Watch your vocalizer." Lockdown grit out roughly, as though struck. Prowl turned and glared at him, blue burning dangerously bright.

"You have no right to lie to me, neutral--not when you are the true traitor."

"_Kid_," the old musclecar roared, jerking when Torque's servos clamped around his wiry, ruined arms, holding him back from the quivering bike model.

"Get out. _Now!"_

They left him to shout, Torque pushing Lockdown out of the suffocating room. Her own plating rattled, cold with panic—the way he started forward, she knew he was going to strike or grab the bike, which was the last thing they wanted. When they struggled out into the hallway and the door snapped shut, she grunted as she was dashed against the wall with a ringing clang. Her depth perception and resolution and stimuli field quailed wildly as Lockdown's huge body crunched up against her comparatively tiny frame; his servos hooked onto her shoulder-plating; he aspirated furiously by her audio-unit, static hissing. Enough brittle red strength burned behind that hold to crush her into the wall, but the fury, fizzling and short-lived as a dwindling star, seeped out of him gear by gear. Weakness dripped in through the cracks and scars Prowl had carved into him.

Carefully, very carefully, she reached up and ran her digits down his buckling face. Lockdown pushed into the touch and shuddered violently, as though everything inside of him stopped cold for a terrifying moment, then let her hold him until he could grieve no more.


	48. Connections

A/N: So at first you were like WOAH! And then WOW and then HEY!

And then you hated me :D

PS: Starshine, I really liked your take on what should have happened with Prowl's recovery. If there were a less violent way to do this, yours would have been top on the list :3 Thank you everyone for your comments and suggestions, I love and read every one of them!

* * *

Connections

* * *

Sometime in the incessant black cycle of deep space, Prowl rebooted with a hiss of electricity, servos already outstretched and swiping defensively at the dark.

His recharge had been fitful of late, understandably, but this was different: the energy signature fretting at his stimuli field, that which had inexplicably badgered him out of recharge at least four times in the past two solar-cycles, was now so strong that he could actually register it in his neural net. It tickled along his cold plating in the fathomless black of his storage-room prison, fomenting an incredible panic in the young mech. Scraping into a defensive position on his small berth, Prowl tensed for a blow, for any sort of intrusion from the outer ship he had never seen. None came.

Once the alarming sensation proved that it was not a precursor for anything of concern, but an event in and of itself, Prowl moved like a befuddled blind creature, tracing the current as it practically frolicked through his neural circuitry, bursting happily at every node. His visor bent in confusion and, had he not been trapped, something like curiosity: he had never felt anything akin to this. His servos quested in the dark—and with a half-irritated thought, the dark was no more. He squinted up at the lights, further perplexed, then reached for the wall, led by the eager, strangely feminine current.

"Hello?" he whispered after a long, silent moment, feeling foolish and disoriented as he slid his sensitive servos around the flat surface. After another pause, he pressed the crest of his helm to the wall, gathering himself around his Spark.

Offlining his optics and audio-units, he felt for the source of the signal, perhaps in an adjacent cell behind the wall (another captive?), but in truth it eddied all around him, electrifying the non-air. It… enveloped him. The presence trilled and nudged at him again, forcing a baffled twitch of his thin mouth as it seemed to wail briefly and then go right back to batting at him, feverishly. Joy, but scattered and limited. As overwhelmed as the presence, he was nearly smiling when he caught another signal: a commlink.

_She's happy to see you._

Onlining his optics and audios with a harsh crackle, the bike dropped from the wall and jerked around to face the door, one arm already braced in front of his chassis. It was the femme. She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, yellow optics glowing. He stared at her wordlessly, visor wide.

"Her name is Moot," she said after a moment, entering his cell at a careful walk. She smiled faintly, gesturing to the room—all of it and any of it. "Sturdy and sweet."

"She is…" he began haltingly, perplexed by her vague motions even as he watched her closely, as one tracks an armed being.

"The ship."

"She is sentient?"

"Enough to worry after you. She missed you as well," she said softly, watching the young bike look up at the blank, low ceiling in something like wonder as another wave of scattered electric chatter hit him.

The little carrier really did adore him; she had been responding more quickly than ever since they found him. She was ecstatic to have her small kind friend back, too limited to see past the simple fact of his bright young Spark, once more burning in close proximity. If only it had been so simple for them. When Prowl's wide blue gaze drifted to her, Torque captured it with a wistful, waiting expression, full mouth twisted tenderly.

"You were gone quite a while, love."

He was disarmed enough by the phenomena to look at her vacantly for another moment, then seemed to shut down in the next, averting his optics and resuming his defensive crouch on the berth, hyperaware of any movement from his captor. It was his usual behavior after being reminded of the life they claimed he had, hanging above him as surely as the low ceiling. The old femme sighed.

"How are you feeling?" she asked, watching the ninjabot carefully.

"Well enough," he answered flatly after a long stretch of silence, finally shifting into a sitting position—the lotus position, save for the aggressive grip of his servos on his knee-joints. He half-glared up at her, daring her to come closer or try further. "Well enough and nothing more. If I speak to you, it is only to say that I have nothing more for you."

It had been a routine of the past few solar-cycles. After the initial appeal to download his memories, Prowl stayed holed up in his room, visited every solar-cycle by the other bike, who would simply talk to him. It was casual and gentle, but never benign, as every thread led back to him and the razed span in his memory core. She asked after all of his experiences: everything he had seen or felt or been told since he rebooted half a stellar-cycle ago, then, merciless, she asked for more. The beginning had been rocky and silent, but she—or his constant, destructive vigilance—had exhausted him to the point where he now allowed her to sit within feet of him. A considerable victory.

There he sat, more often in the dark than in the light, with more compelling proof of a previous existence than he had ever before possessed—artifacts, strange gold and black modifications, a charming herbaceous organism and a collection of alien prose a thousand gigabytes deep, all things he could see himself owning—but still he could not begin to accept it as truth. His only memories of life, no matter how flawed, were simply so different from a dark storage closet, crushed from all sides by dark space. Him, a deep-space wanderer--a traitor? He rejected it and the ugly mech and his femme instantaneously; he had to, because he had standards to live up to.

Anicon was the only thing he had ever known. It was more difficult to escape his mark and his world than it was to squirm out of his own black traitor exostructure—or keep his face expressionless when the black and green bounty hunter was nearby. It was a feat, when his mere hulking presence made Prowl feel as though his Sparkchamber was entirely too small. It was a suffocating, almost painful feeling after nursing an injured Spark for so long, and the pull—the illogical convulsive pulse he couldn't control—frightened him more than any threat.

He could abide pain. Just not this… confusion.

"Prowl."

'Torque' sat down beside him on the berth, closer than ever before. He looked over sharply when she said his name, so gently, like it was a weakness—and it was.

The strangely-constructed femme was trying to squirm inside of him with these visits, he knew. She used his one claim to life so naturally, as if he had always been there. With her; with the bounty hunter. He was beginning to hate the sound of his own name, remembering how Anicon used it much the same. He, too, had wished for nothing but his happiness. Prowl glared to the side, knowing what she was going to ask.

"I know you've been more than patient with me, but I need you to talk with me a little longer. I know you haven't told me everything you remember, and you can't afford to leave anything out. I need… every last feeling, every suspicion you ever had. Every flutter."

He did not respond to her. Her weary tone, thickened with whatever odd and ancient sonar-accent she claimed, did not move him. After a minute Torque tapped the floor near his knee, begging his attention.

"We're trying to help you find what you're missing. Sort yourself out," she murmured. She studied his severe profile, searching for the right words for this hostile soul. "What harm can come of telling us what you know?"

"Much," he responded sharply, shifting a foot away from her. "It gives you the ability to twist your story to suit my limited memories, which you will excuse me if I choose to deny you."

He was turned away, and so did not see her wounded expression, nor the servo that she pressed to her chassis. Perhaps because she was so focused on new chances to talk to him, she did not see the breadth of his jaded nature until that moment: the manipulation he weathered defined his every sentient moment, which he spent preparing, tooth and nail, for another assault. No rest, no trust. Her blurry Spark contracted briefly, hurting for the sweet, misused bike; aching for the entire senseless chain of events that led him there.

"You're… among friends, darling," she promised, fighting to put every tremble of what she felt into her husky vocals. When she attempted to touch him, just a brush to his servo, he flinched away, but she grabbed it firmly and did not let go, finishing, "Friends who love you too much to deny you the truth, even for our own happiness."

It struck him in some small sense. He didn't move to pull his servo away, at least. Prowl glowered down at the floor, a concentrated lump of volatile energy gnashing away inside his gold-trimmed chassis.

"I would like to believe that," he said bitterly, then looked up at the ceiling again. "Unfortunately, I have no proof that such a thing is even possible."

"What?" she asked, squeezing his servo.

"Selflessness. True caring."

As if to follow the empty tone of his words, there was a long pause in which neither 'bot spoke, each staring away or inside of themselves. Then Prowl, visor blue, thin and distant, spoke quietly.

"That mech. Lockdown. He did not… kill Anicon."

"No. He didn't," she answered, vocals faint for her probable lie. It was all she could surmise, from Lockdown's overt restlessness, and the better answer. After an uneasy moment, Prowl nodded.

"Good. I do not know much of the true order of the universe, but I know he did not deserve to die."

"What would you say he deserves, Prowl?" she asked him, watching his long, elegant face carefully as he thought about it—and when he spoke, his vocals held a blank, unflinching strength that stilled her down to her center.

"To be alone until the end of time."

For some—for one delicate, desperate mech—it was a fate worse than death.

* * *

More solar-cycles. More questions. More silence: the only thing dwindling in number were epiphanies.

After spending so much time with him, Torque had managed to earn some small piece of Prowl's withered trust. He spoke and she gathered the information as best she could, preparing it for Lockdown and the final conclusion they would be forced to cement together. She wouldn't repeat everything senselessly, however: there were some things that would simply upset her old friend.

The lengths to which the Elite youngling had gone to bewilder Prowl, for example… it was shameful. Utterly shameful. It even caused her, so well-traveled in sorrow, to grit her dentals and think too long and too hard about her next question; she fumed and trembled for every moment Lockdown had been denied his life-partner for the sake of some saccharine, disjointed fantasy—and that wasn't even considering the stubborn, arrogant 'bot that selfsame farce had produced.

In truth, the current Prowl was causing Lockdown a good deal of pain even as he avoided the bike. There had been an ugly moment where they left the young mech alone, room unlocked. He had not shown any inclination toward wandering, and even then they would have welcomed it as a sign of trust. That solar-cycle, however, he ended up slipping into the workshop—the trophy room. Prowl cried out, horror-stuck, and they rushed in. They found him on the floor, scrambling back against the wall with his servo pressed against his mouth and the half-lit rows of modifications and chipped body-parts pressing in from all sides; the conflicted, wrathful look on Lockdown's face was horrible to see.

Lockdown didn't know what to do, so he left. He turned and strode out without a word, fists quivering at his sides. They should have locked it, or locked his door; anything to prevent what they should have considered from the very first. Torque did her best to bundle the child away from the skeletons and back into his room, gritting through horrified shudders and hoarse accusations alike.

The mech was monstrous, he snarled, Pit-spawned and worse, and she was too tired and hurt to begin to explain. It took a while for that upset to settle, but when it did… it seemed to have no impact on the small amount of trust she had won from him—only Lockdown's. Otherwise, it was Sparkbreaking, what he asked her.

"_What do you know of me?"_

He was a young mech, trained in Metallikato, Alkaline school. Autobot origin. The facts seemed to give him no comfort, yet he continued to ask—much as she kept asking questions long after her hope had faded. Each desperate, in their own way.

She walked out of his room for the seventh time in solar-cycles, unsurprised to find Lockdown waiting for her by the vista. He didn't look up, focusing on tearing his right thigh-plating up with the tips of his claw digits—a nervous, hopeless habit he'd gathered when fearing that Prowl was offline or worse. By now all the paint was gone, replaced by a scarred, raw patch of dark metal. The rest of him was chipped and unbalanced, as though all of his millennia had caught up with him and eaten the gloss off of his plating in one hard stellar-cycle, leaving him a creaking wreck; he sat motionlessly, dashed against the wall with his white head hanging at an odd angle.

"You get anything?"

It was the first time he had truly spoken to her since Prowl denied them. He was aware of what she was doing—always aware, knowing her to be his only hope of reaching out to this new Prowl—but he never found anything to say till now. The isolation had sapped them both. Prompted, already exhausted, she began.

"Nothing substantial. His concrete banks are definitely demolished and that Elite… he worked very hard to turn him against what memories he had. He doesn't appear to have any records of… that place—the place you lost him, or what happened after. At this point, I don't even know when he was wiped, or if there's just a blocker. I would assume the youngling wiped him again, for safety's sake… but we won't know anything without a scan."

"He'll 'probly throw a fit at that too." Lockdown scraped his claw across the raw metal, barely flinching as he carved three stripes into his plating and the inflamed neural network buzzing underneath, then said, strangely strangled, "Gotta be more than that."

"Nothing, Lockdown," she whispered.

Even though it really wasn't nothing. The old femme hesitated, knowing what trouble and anguish this could cause—useless frustration and temptation—and Lockdown felt it. Finally, when he shifted to look up at her with his slack facial plating and guttering optics, she shook her head hopelessly and murmured, "It's complicated. Probably stray impulses, a glitch of the extrapolative logic drive, but he felt something more, at one point. He said the only time he could get a… flash of you—what I think is you--was…"

"When?" he croaked, grinding at her reluctance with his unwavering optics. His substructure tightened fiercely when she put a servo over her abdominal plating and looked away.

"When they were intimate."

The bridge was silent. Moot murmured beneath them, eternally unaware. When Lockdown came to himself, his dentals were crammed together so tightly he could feel his blank processor vibrating; shock left an ugly, coppery aftertaste in his sensors.

"Y'mean when they 'faced," he rasped slowly, too slowly. A vitriolic current radiated from his abused center, tangible even from feet away; he twitched his digits and another metal shaving tinkled hollowly in the thin black air. "Him… and the brat."

"Lockdown," Torque said firmly, vocals quivering as Lockdown's optics lit from the craggy surface of his black-marked facial plating, blazing bright and bare. She tried to catch his optic; to ground him. "Jealousy has no place here."

The musclecar seethed in horrible silence for a moment, lip-plating pulled back in a snarl, then glared up at her.

"Why? Why would that happen?"

"I would… assume it has something to do with jogging his Spark. You never merged, but he probably retained some residual energy in his system. Your energy, your signature," the bike murmured vaguely, shuttering her optics. "Maybe a few leftover abstracts in his cache. An… impression, nothing more. Certainly nothing he will trust."

He thought about it, even as she spoke; thought beyond it, with a growing fever. His engine gunned, low and dangerous, then he seemed to jerk to a conclusion in his processor and stiffened in a different way, resolute and colored by a simmering anger. He turned his blood-red optics to the vista, briefly scouring the black void, then, with no change in expression, heaved himself to his pedes.

"Guess that's it, then," he muttered to himself and started to walk—away from the dark of space and towards Prowl's hallway.

"Wh—Lockdown?"

Painfully perplexed, Torque watched him stride mechanically out of the bridge, then, with a speed only gained by knowing _how he worked_—direct and hard, bordering on pitiless—she realized his intent and hurried to his side. Her vocals were faint and frightened, tone seeking to halt him as much as her grasping digits.

"Darling, no. You'll—you'll scare him."

"S'the only way," he grunted, beastly face set straight ahead, blank ruthlessness seeming to increase with every echoing step. "Talkin' hasn't done anything, he's got nothin' left. This won't go any further without _Prowl_."

She nearly stopped in her tracks, mouth open and Spark in her intake, then rushed after him with new panic. He stalked to the kid's door, opening it and shutting her out with a quick push and a step to the side. Torque was yelling at him now, telling him he was as good as a stranger and it was abuse, and the door closed behind him with a stark, final snap.

"Lock," he said hoarsely. It did.

Prowl, caught unawares on the floor and spooked by the snap, immediately scrambled up. He backed into the berth, trying not to look like a cornered sparkling with the spiked musclecar standing so close, red optics smoldering in the half-light. His Spark flickered when he heard the door lock, the fear he had worked so long to suppress through jittery, broken meditation gushing up and conquering him in a hard klik.

"What do you want?" he demanded, vocals already cold.

Nothing about him betrayed the wild, wanting leap of his Spark, reacting to the other mech like oil to red fire and only worsened by the unflinching, almost hateful intensity of his gaze. Prowl simply looked at the Decepticon, ugly, angry and fearsome, and waited for the threatening vibrations to lead somewhere as his insides twisted and lurched for unknown reasons. Finally, the mech, Lockdown, seemed to breathe some of it out then carefully lean against the locked door.

"To pick your processor," he said at length, black-marked faceplates hard and unreadable.

"Your companion has already extracted the heft of my information," Prowl informed him tensely, turning away only enough to communicate an utter unwillingness to cooperate. He gestured, short and sharp. "I am tired. Leave."

He was forced to face his captor again as they were interrupted by someone—the femme—banging on the storage-room door, viciously cursing the old mech. Wide mouth twisting in a snarl, Lockdown pressed a digit to his audio unit and commed her, the 'brief words' he shared mirrored on his angry expression. Struck off balance, Prowl watched closely, intent on reading their interactions to predict his fate. The bike could hear the femme wait for a horrendously long time, as indicated by Lockdown's reciprocal motionlessness, then turn on her heel with a furious, hopeless screech and walk off.

Suspicious as both hunters were, he felt a good deal less safe for it. He and the musclecar were alone. Lockdown turned back to him, visibly fighting to clear his gravelly vocals of any leftover frustration.

"You thought anymore about the download?"

"My answer has not changed," Prowl assured him, visor narrowing. Lockdown growled with startling immediacy, something churning away inside of him and eventually manufacturing a dragging, artificial sneer.

"What if I say I'll offline you if you don't say yes?"

"You will not. Whatever I am, you require me for something, the success of which will be damaged if I am offline," Prowl responded, almost arching his optic ridge. "I know my worth."

Lockdown almost saw his partner—his Prowl—standing there, well-adjusted and informative, degrading himself to inert collateral. Price, worth. That's what the Elite had taught him: that he was to be measured in physical ways, uncomprehending of the pull of that abstract and singular preciousness to another creature. No one could get away from having a price tag put on them.

Prowl met his stare unflinchingly, seeing only, from Anicon's halting, fearful description, the degenerate mech who had stolen some part of him. Though the story it had been built on had crumbled away, that animosity would not be soon to fade. Lockdown saw that; felt it like a stake in his joints, stopping him as surely as any wall.

"Alright. Sharp kid," he ceded, faceplates once more unreadable as he crossed his wiry arms. He waited until Prowl snorted and looked aside, done with him, before he continued, all too steadily. "Then I just wanna know. Did you get into it?"

The bike's visor dented. He looked at Lockdown warily, unnerved by his dangerously casual tone as much as his words, and simply waited. The musclecar's optics flared.

"When you and that limp-jacked glitch 'faced," he hissed.

"_What_?"

Prowl became nothing more than a metal shell and a tightly-bound Spark, visor wide. He simply froze and stared, appalled and too shocked to formulate a real answer—if there was one. For a 'bot denied any sort of confrontation for months, the assault could not have been more crude. The words were still cycling through his tight insides, widening his mouth and leading him to the femme's brutal betrayal of his confidence, when Lockdown pushed himself from the wall and _pushed on_, vocals roughening and gaining spiteful cadence.

"Bet it was nice. Soft. Bet he made you say that you loved him n' you'd be with him forever."

"You—quiet. How dare you," he whispered without thinking, putting his servos out in front of him as some sort of premature shield. Seeing the unwavering advance of the behemoth mech, an unspeakable panic bubbled underneath his collected black exostructure; every word soured in his chassis and the room got smaller, so much smaller.

"Yeah, he 'probly got into it plenty. He wanted you for a long time, kid. Waited for it. He got off in kliks, didn't he—just with you touchin' him. Short-start. Pathetic."

"Stop. _Stop_."

The command could have been for his slow, deadly pace or his words; Lockdown respected neither interpretation.

"But you? You needed somethin' more. Somethin' that wasn't him, somethin' that he couldn't give you, right?"

"Stop t--it is _my_ business, not yours, degenerate," Prowl grit out, vocals strangled, pistons beating at his chassis. His Spark contracted, frenzied, at the blunt truth and the roiling nausea it caused; making him experience all over again that duplicitous disorientation, that shame that came after every stretch of unsatisfied blackness. He stared at the other mech uncomprehendingly even as he backed away, scrabbling for anything to say. "You have no right to speak of things you do not understand!"

His back was against the berth. A quick grope confirmed his cornered state, the movement shaking off droplets of coolant-spawned condensation. The enormous bounty hunter was outside himself, in an altered state--one the bike could sense was infinitely more dangerous even than the rage he had witnessed. Prowl almost bolted past him toward the locked door, then flinched sharply when Lockdown stopped a mere span away from him, a joyless, dead smirk on his evilly-marked face.

"Think I understand better'n you, kid. Lemme educate you," the bounty hunter said, and, with a creak of abused tensors, reached for him.


	49. The Deals We Make

* * *

The Deals We Make

* * *

Prowl's violent disbelief lasted no more than a klik: there was no way to watch the servo come closer and doubt the mech's intentions. Spark halving in one white jolt, he tried to pull away, but the other's red servo closed around his carpal joint, snatching him straight. His claw-mod, hard against his waist, prevented any more frantic twisting.

If the room had closed in the moment the musclecar stepped toward him, his chamber collapsed to have the mech in such grinding proximity, looming above him at least two full spans: the very image that Anicon fed to him, fearsome in his own right without the myth fleshing his optics into evil embers. Prowl quailed, terror coupled with the oily scent and pure heft of his assailant then the bounty hunter bent toward him. Prowl went rigid, jerked back and punched him across the jaw.

The clang was short and sharp and singular. Lockdown staggered back one step, only half dislodged: one hard servo was still locked around Prowl's wrist. He looked up from putting his monstrous clicking claw mod to his white jaw to see Prowl's visor ablaze with a mad, hot blue even as the slight mech trembled down to his girders.

"You will not touch me."

Lockdown heard it as though through a daze. His ugly facial plating twisted into smirk.

"Forgot what an arrogant little slagger you were," he said, tone a cross between bitterness and haggard affection. The old mech glared at him for a moment before seizing the small model around the waist again with a curt clang. "Almost can't stand you."

Pressing the younger mech backwards, Lockdown bent and their mouths connected. Prowl bit down out of a mixture of vicious panic and spite, tearing into the malleable white dermaplating as he fought to free himself. Fluid dribbled down his chin; Lockdown's grunt of pain was immediate, but he did no more than levy the bike's pedes off the floor and attempt to force him onto the berth.

As terrifying as the scenario was, nothing before then had truly _connected_ Prowl to the events unfolding like that one lurch did, when combined with the scrape of the berth along his unguarded thighs. Systems suddenly screaming, he threw all of his weight into the other mech. The impact threw Lockdown off balance and Prowl flew at him as soon as his pedes hit the floor, servos swinging hard and fast and to kill.

As skilled as the burst was, as high his crystalline terror, he only managed two or three hits before the bounty hunter grabbed him—not dumbly, not counting on _force_, but expertly at the joints--and twisted him up and forced him down over the berth in one fluid movement, mashing his long face into the cold surface.

"You ain't the only one with a little Metallikato up their pipes," Lockdown grunted, securing both of Prowl's wrists into his claw and leaning toward the bike's audio. "Haven't brought that skill out for a long time, kid. Mostly I just punch until they can't stand up anymore. You're lucky I like your chassis too much to put a dent in it."

"Release me! Now!" Prowl snarled, gears clicking maddeningly as he strained against the mech's iron hold. His fear-white Spark was too taxed to bear the monstrous presence behind him, hot air streaming from between all of his heavy dark plating, about to crash down—

"Not until I show you a few things about yourself."

Prowl hardly heard him. His cryptic nonsense was of far less bearing than the aching vulnerability making his every slender limb shake, but then he felt the bounty hunter's servo on his hyper-sensitive fairing. At the touch, his processor raced: there was a desperate, ingenious moment where a hum came from his thrusters and he tensed, preparing to kick off with the coming blast, but the servo dug down into his fairing and yanked him to the tips of his pedes. Prowl hissed in pain as the thin metal appendage creaked under his weight, thrusters winding down with an abrupt moan.

"I wasn't plannin' on hurtin' you, kid--but if you turn those jet-boosters on me, I just might."

The threat stilled him. Lockdown let him fall back over the berth, unceremonious, and shoved his face down once more, for punctuations' sake. A convulsive mixture of anger and fear swept the bike; he aspirated sharply when the mech grabbed his other fairing. After a strange pause, Lockdown's digits scraped down the side of the structure, ending in a rough pinch at the bottom.

It was like some sort of localized sensory reboot. Sideswiped, Prowl shuddered. He actually _responded_, quick and involuntary, one leg twitching up as his neural net flared.

"You like that?"

The electrical gust was over as abruptly as it arrived. Prowl mustered himself, boiling; Lockdown did it again, this time running two digits on either side of his cooling booster vents with just the right amount of force. Prowl nearly heard the delicate metal casings and connections creak and the vulnerable, inexplicably sweet sensation shook him to his core, making his visor flicker even as a tense, confused spurt of static escaped his vocalizer.

"Looks like your sensors still know what you like even if you don't. Y'always did like having your fairings dicked with. Blank core don't change that."

For cycles, Lockdown did nothing but hold him down over the berth and touch him.

Fear, like an odorless gas, mixed with physical hysteria as Prowl tensed up over and over and over again, expecting so much more than the perversely careful caresses that always ended in a roughness he—his mechanics--couldn't help but respond to, as though they had been… pre-programmed or trained for it. His sensors were hyperactive, registering every small, practiced assault intensely, not as pleasure but as something that could be pleasure. It was shameful, confounding and utterly real, and so Prowl, lost and besieged, battled himself and his reactions as much as Lockdown's servo obscenely rubbing his cream-plated leg.

It was hard, fighting to keep up the panic that would lend him the strength to escape. At a single flagging in willpower ten cycles in—he did not arch aggressively when the servo scraped down his tank but simply let the immediate tremor course through his exhausted body—Lockdown pulled back and pushed him to the floor.

The sudden move and the impact stunned him, and the other mech quickly pinned his arms above his helm, trapping the bike's thin legs under his own. Prowl's feeling of exposure doubled and he thrashed, cursing the mech as he, a monster in the low light with red optics burning close to his thin visor, splayed his servo over Prowl's front. He skipped the blocky rise of the Autobot crest to slide along the scar looping his chassis, a static-thick hiss escaping his vocalizer.

"Where'd you get this, Prowl?"

Prowl's only response was a roll of his hips and a muffled snarl; Lockdown put more of his weight on the other and the bike stopped immediately at the sound and feel of metal creaking. His visor remained fixed on his captor as Lockdown continued, his thick digits rubbing along the disfiguration with a fierceness Prowl couldn't fathom. The sensation sent nauseated chills through him.

"Get your servos off of me."

"You even know what it is?"

"I said unhand me!"

"_What is this to you?_"

Prowl did not know. How could he?

All he knew was that he had kept it. He knew he had to keep it, even as Anicon offered, time and again, to have it carved off and glossed over. No, he knew one more thing: that running his digits along it gave him some sort of comfort as he was time and again beset with echoes of rough, fulfilled half-memories as the Elite's white shell lay nearby, peacefully flat-lining in the cool greenery.

"I--do not know!" Prowl grit out at last, throwing his helm back. His servos flexed uselessly above Lockdown's grip. The musclecar leaned forward and his vocals nearly vibrated his petite frame, bleeding mouth far too close to his audio.

"I'll tell you. We were on a run. Shootin' for Blend. His lackies gutted you. Found you nearly off-lining in your own fluids, comm ripped clean out of your helm. You were too stupid to tell me you'd had your front casing sliced off. Twenty-something megacycles I spent patching you up, pulling you through by the bolts on your plating. Those gizmos in you, they're mine. What'd your brat's medics have to say about those?"

Somewhere he wondered how the bounty hunter could know about them: those strange curvy mechanisms, sitting heavy in his chassis, that the murmuring medics had hardly dared touch.

The answers were easy. Scans, Prowl thought unsteadily, scans--before any and all semblance of information processing was shattered when the old bounty hunter looked at him for a hard moment, then bent and pressed his wide mouth to the bike's rounded chassis. The fear barely had time to spike before the other mech hummed over his trapped Spark, deep and hard. The result was explosive: terror and striking _need_ fused into a painful palpitation, bringing Prowl's already aching center to a high riotous pulsation. He twisted and gasped, nearly crying out.

He thought (he _felt_: that heady vibration drowned out anything resembling binary processing) that that was the worst it could get, until Lockdown shifted up and moved to crush their two chassis together and Prowl groaned aloud, cool vocals cracking. His body jerked desperately beneath Lockdown's enormous frame as their Sparks fought toward one another with a high-frequency convulsion; a horrible, dumb, _wanting_ suffocation flooded all of his faculties.

It had been so long, _it had been so long_, some wordless, blinding part of him howled, and it swept him and wrecked him. When the other mech pulled away only to press close again, condensation running down his contorted white facial plating, Prowl keened. His optics shorted as the initial burst faded, leaving him cringing and shivering. The sensation was so strong it even purged his fear, but left him with a dread that went hand in hand with the deep, terrifying helplessness radiating from his chamber.

It was terrifying, to be so defenseless under such a criminal, even without the chaos raging in him. His processor screamed at him to fight back, but his body, tired of dominance, tired of fighting for conflict with a cringing sycophant, wanted nothing more than surrender and an end to this sharp illogical craving. The other's old star burned so near to his own and he had to struggle to keep his hot chamber plating closed, fighting his own jittering mechanics and not even knowing why he had to do so.

"Stop," he sobbed, trembling to open up—to just _let him in_ and give this filthy, violent stranger access to his glowing center. "Please, stop!"

"Not until you remember me, agree to the download or we take this all the way," Lockdown grit out, vocals worn down to a croak. His tone was callous, but it couldn't mask the quiver in the bounty hunter's core: because they were _his_ vocals, terrified and yearned for, no matter if he had come too far to stop and the blank 'bot beneath him was denying him someone he loved.

It continued.

Within cycles, Prowl was twitching and growling, twisting as though struck when Lockdown's claw scraped down his side and sent another jolt of would-be pleasure through him. His hot systems were churning and growling, motor purring: all dumb reactions to stimuli that Prowl realized, with each new scrape, was exact and knowledgeable, as practiced in delivery as his neural net was in receiving.

The young mech hardly cared for intentions any more. He had no fear that could surpass the current situation as his body demanded something he neither wanted nor understood, but Prowl still haltingly onlined his optics and looked up when there were no more servos and no more provocations. He shook madly in the deathly quiet room, black plating clanking in time. Lockdown was leaning over him, hard optics lit with an echoing exhaustion that no slack facial plating could intimate.

All of his push had abandoned him in a single moment, seeing Prowl twisted and pleading underneath him: his anger and frustration at the Elite, at the sick state of things, had fueled the assault, but now he stilled as though woken to the damning truth of things. With this act, he'd proven himself capable of the one thing he was, when free, incapable of: taking his partner by force.

Lockdown shuttered his optics, something moaning deep within his battered, fractured shell.

"What've you got to say for yourself, ninjabot?"

The bike's visor buzzed blankly, then something behind the blue kicked to life again. Roused, Prowl gritted his dentals, fighting to pull together whatever sense he had left.

"You are—_evil_."

"This is about you, kid, not me," he said in the same dull tone, unshuttering and looking him square in the optics. "How do you wanna explain this away?"

"You bugged me," Prowl hissed through his dentals. "Infected me. Scanned my neural net for hypersensitivity points, _something_."

"You d—"

"I was in stasis when you took me aboard, you could have done anything!" he nearly screamed, the panic he should have been feeling all along overwhelming him in a sickening lurch as Lockdown's beastly features twisted dangerously above him, almost as though the accusation struck him deeply.

"I'd never do that t'you. _Never_," he roared, pushing Prowl harder to the floor if just to cut the panic off somewhere and make the bike listen as he gestured at the poorly lit room. "One look'll tell you, I don't have the equipment for slag like that—and unlike your Elite protoform, I don't screw with 'bots processors. You can run self-check scans 'till Unicron flies outta the Pit, there's nothing in you that you didn't come in with. That, right there, that was pure you and nothin' you accuse me of is gonna change that, _you get me_?"

Even before he heard it, Prowl knew it was true. There was an instinct to the mech's ministrations that simple awareness of sensitivity could not claim; there was an instinct in his own response that no fear could slaughter. A scan would not intimate such… knowledge. Prowl stared at the wall, exhaustion settling deep in his cavernous scarred chassis. His intakes hitched as the bounty hunter's servo brushed his waist, almost tenderly.

"I know you like no one else, kid. You'll see that, if I have to beat it into you. Now what've you got to say for yourself?"

The musclecar possessed a scraping honesty that shattered the last of his will to _excuse_. Lost in a new landscape of ugly reality and self-loathing, Prowl went limp. Protesting. Hopeless.

"I am… not like this," he began, more than desperate. He fought to control his vocals, ashamed of the jump and warmth of his body, his purring engine and engorged Spark. "This is impossible. A glitch."

"And what'd you feel back on that planet?" Lockdown demanded. "What was that?"

That feeling, when the mech first touched him chamber-to-chamber. Perfect. Transcendent, a true connection. Illogical in so beautiful a way.

Memory chased out of his core by the physical threat of the fearsome mech atop him, Prowl shook his head vehemently, no longer even aware of the room around him.

"That was—chance, it was nothing! Absolutely nothing!"

"You just don't wanna believe me," the bounty hunter growled with dawning rage, red optics narrowing. Prowl, in a sudden spurt of panic, tried to free his servos again, writhing when Lockdown clamped down harder than he ever had before.

"Given a choice, why would I?!" he demanded. "I have seen you—I know what you are! No matter how far I have fallen, now or then, life with you could be nothing but a mistake!"

Prowl cried out and arched as Lockdown's black weight descended full force and his grip tightened convulsively, huge servo literally crunching down into the slim black carpal plating with a tinny creak. Pain shot through his forearms, gathering at his legs, but that didn't keep him from feeling the raw shudder and choke of the mech hanging above him, as though something had been ripped from his scuffed chassis and his cold mechanical bowels locked from the shock: it didn't stop the fear as the resulting chasm filled with blessed fury and lit the bounty hunter's optics a mad red.

"You'll change your coding, 'cos as far as I'm concerned, you _don't have a choice_," Lockdown snarled, servos unsticking from his dented wrists only to slam down on his chassis, pinning him to the ground. "You're dealin' with a desperate mech, kid, one who's done a lot worse than this to get where he is. You're lookin' at a long, long time in this room until you agree—and that's _until_, 'cos there's nothing out here but stars and we, me and the gal, we can wait as long as it takes. You don't know who you're keeping me from and I can't think of a thing I wouldn't do to get him back. A few centuries are nothin' to me. Process that good and hard, brat, and think before you talk."

They remained so for a long time. Lockdown glared into the bike's long face, taking bare sustenance from the sight of the cool blue visor and thin mouth even as his old Spark pounded bitterly. He waited.

Slender servos twisted around the claw on his plating, Prowl turned to the side, staring toward the wall: something minute flickered across his features, processor humming behind the sad blue, then came a pause so still and prolonged that the old mech was afraid he had gone into stasis. Before he could move to check, Prowl spoke, low and blank.

"Release me. I will not attempt escape."

Lockdown studied him for a moment more, then removed his servos with a creak. Prowl straightened himself, hidden optics lingering too-briefly on the digit-shaped dents on his wrists, then sat upright, motionless. His unfocused gaze fixed on the corner of the tiny room, far below the data pad and the tree and the gold-rimmed modifications that lay silent and ownerless.

"What am I? Truly?" he asked at last, entire being reduced to little more than a lost blue flicker in the half-dark.

"My partner," Lockdown said fiercely, as though it were everything.

For the first time, Prowl listened. Then he kept listening, as though the word would leave an echo he hadn't heard before. A ring of truth. But it sounded the same and the room offered nothing more than silence.

"Words. They prove nothing," he murmured sadly, optics dimming. No matter how many times it was repeated, it would never become real to him, but he also realized he would never trust it—or anyone. He heard the bounty hunter make a noise—something between a snort and a growl, impatient—and shook his head, Spark sinking at what had to come next. He refreshed his vocals. Bracing himself.

"If you were to present me with something I could not deny, I would have no choice but to believe you."

Lockdown stared at him, off-put by both his dull tone and his unwavering gaze.

"And what would that be, since you've managed to put your pede in everything else we've shown you?"

"That sensation."

It had been beautiful.

It was full of the things he had craved most at the time, and he craved them still: recognition, belonging, true and Spark-strong _care_. Prowl finally experienced what it would have felt like to be whole and at peace for one pristine moment, only to have it ripped away. He was still afraid to believe it meant anything, even as it was the only thing that had changed his lost state and it had come from the bounty hunter.

Perhaps the mech fit the figure he half-felt while fumbling around in his own gutted banks, trying to find himself inside Anicon's story. The dark, strong presence, the friend to the side. Some of the proof, all of it ugly, lay in the last half-megacycle. Despite all of his despicable circumstances, no matter what it… meant about himself, perhaps he was this mech's partner.

No, euphemisms were not an option. It would mean that he was a traitor to his own kind, living with a violent, lawless mech he did not want to understand in the slightest. But it seemed like a far-off story and not something he had to capitulate to directly, and Prowl, viciously empty, was so tired of being suspicious, so tired of resisting. He wanted someplace to rest. An identity.

Lockdown made to speak, because the fact he was _admitting that it happened_ already made it undeniable, but Prowl looked away and murmured:

"If you can… bring that sensation back, I will agree to the download."

He had stunned the other mech. The hulking musclecar quieted, frowning deeply as though trying to sort through the possibilities. His thought-process left him with a very wary expression, hardly comprehending the aloof calm of the very small, hostile bot before him.

"Only one way to do that," he said slowly.

"You do not need to explain the details of my own decision," Prowl responded, defensive iciness creeping back into his vocals and posture alongside a trickle of fear. "I realize what I am asking for."

"You wouldn't weather me touchin' you before. Now you're gonna let me near your chamber."

The bounty hunter still regarded him in disbelief—but a wideness of his optics went beyond that, as though _wanting_ him to be wrong and recant. Prowl nodded.

"As I stated before, you need me online. If you harm me, however, the deal is off and you will never receive as much as a moments' cooperation from me. Am I clear?"

Lockdown nodded stiffly after a long, long pause and the deal was struck.

A simple, comparatively fortuitous transaction had never made the musclecar so tense, crouching a few spans from the sitting bike. He rumbled edgily and dragged his weight across the floor, slowly. He reached forward, awkwardly running a servo along the bike model's thigh-plating, then stopped when he neared the joint, not half as quick and intuitive without rage and motivation.

Another moment and the beast looked away from the younger mech's unflinching stare, nearly growling in frustration. Prowl's helm components whirred.

"You hesitate."

"Yeah."

"Or you are stalling," Prowl said with mounting scorn, visor thinned. "Because you know you cannot duplicate what occurred by chance."

"I'm stallin' 'cos I don't want to do it," Lockdown snapped, removing his servo and glaring past him.

"My exostructure has not changed—am I not as attractive as your lover?"

Lockdown did not refute it or rail as the other mech expected. The words partner and lover had tangled in his processor long ago, one unspeakable and the other used to any effect: it could mean anything, but mostly it just meant the bot sitting stiffly in front of him, finally under his servos, yet a completely different creature. The jab garnered no response; Lockdown grumbled something, still unmoving. Prowl frowned at him.

"You are reluctant," the bike tried again, slowly, visor deepening with his sudden realization. "Because I am not him."

"Just take the download, kid," Lockdown muttered, leaning heavily on his legs. "You don't need t'do this."

"No. I cannot. Not without this last piece of proof."

The ninjabot's tone was concrete. Lockdown's helm creaked forward, the line of his spiked back spelling defeat. It was the only way and they both knew it.

Despite this, Lockdown sat for so long, optics dim, that Prowl had to move, if only to rise to his delicate knee-guards and brush his digits nervously over the old mech's beat-up chassis. It was cold. His own Spark pulsated rapidly in his warmed chamber, half in trepidation, half in long-gestated anticipation of what the final flash would bring.

The proximity gifted him with something more, however: close enough to count scratchmarks and hairpin fractures along the musclecar's nightmarish plating, he finally let himself look at the mech he had built up as such a fearsome creature—who had proved himself a monster time and again—and saw what he refused to see before. Pain. Real, raw, true and tied to _him_ as securely as his wiring.

Slowly, Prowl's servo drifted up to the other mech's white jawline, then he leaned forward and touched his mouth to Lockdown's facial plating. It was his way of closing the distance and therefore closing their strange, terrifying deal, because this had to happen, but with that simple contact, most of Prowl's terror vanished and something even closer to blind longing stole his buckling insides.

Lockdown froze at the caress, muscling down a gut reaction, then shuttered his optics after the petite bike drew away. The depth of crushed emotion in the motionless bounty hunter struck Prowl as little else had. He could almost feel the reverberations in his Spark as it expanded in something like wonder.

"I do not know you," Prowl realized quietly, almost mournfully, because somewhere, he had never given the mech a chance—or the right chance. Lockdown twitched, unshuttering and onlining his optics, then mustered his graying strength in a dangerous stretch of silence, tapping the only channel through which he could manage this act.

"You will," he said, then put one servo to the other's scarred chassis and pushed Prowl back onto the floor.

* * *

Prowl rebooted from perfect darkness in the grip of a blue-white epiphany, a flurry of everythinghecouldhavewanted ripping itself away with the arrival of light and sensory feed and animated mechanics.

He bolted upright and his rightness disintegrated. The bike almost grasped at its retreat, then realized the air was empty and so was he. Gutted again. He looked down: he was on the room's berth, somehow, and the musclecar—_Lockdown_--was sitting on the edge of it, red optics barely lit. His huge, strangely lanky form was nearly bent double as he leaned on his spiked knees. He was waiting, subtle throbbing regret streaming from him through their renewed connection.

Overwhelmed, Prowl moved over to him as quickly as he could, as though plain proximity could give him back that _feeling_ he had chased for so long. Blinded to anything but the mech, he pressed one servo to the old Spark that beat in time with his and simply felt that frequency eddy through his battered body.

Prowl felt the exhaustion. He felt the hollowness that came from being forced to scare him. He could also feel the pain he had inflicted on the other mech by refusing—but he believed.

How could he have not believed?

"I am… I did not—"

"You'll do it."

Lockdown cut him off, tone hollow. He didn't want reasons. He didn't want any more from this impersonator. Prowl stopped, all the more injured.

"Yes. I'll do it," he said weakly, feeling as though it wasn't _enough_. He searched the bounty hunter's blank expression, incomplete Spark clenching. "Give it back to me."

"What."

"My life."

Lockdown shook his head mechanically, optics elsewhere. Processor elsewhere.

"Parts of it ain't pretty."

"It does not matter. It is mine." Prowl watched his… partner for anything, any kind of response. When none came, he slowly laid his helm against the bounty hunter's mangled arm, craving contact to ease the reformed chasm inside him. When he spoke again, his cool vocals finally betrayed the vulnerability that had ruled him for so long. "I hope I am all you think I am."

Prowl shuttered his optics as the same servo that had dented his plating came to rest carefully over the injuries, digits rubbing absently as if to scuff them out of existence.

"And more, kid. And more."


	50. Return

A/N: If I ask anything of you, please don't read this chapter on-the-fly. This needs your time.

* * *

Return

* * *

The femme had been waiting for them. She rose sharply to her pedes when the door opened and scowled at Lockdown, who didn't meet her optics as he walked onwards to the bridge. Prowl stayed close behind and sat when ordered, watching the other mech silently as he bent to retrieve cables and adaptors from a slot, working as though his field of existence were limited to the dark cabinet in front of him.

Torque followed them in. Once she had the musclecar's attention, he told her, vocals echoing oddly in the compartment. She didn't believe it. He said it again. Beyond shocked, she stared back at Prowl with wide yellow optics, processor whirring, then immediately began to argue with Lockdown again.

"We should get him checked first. Scanned."

"Tipper's too far. No sense in it," Lockdown grunted from the floor, screwing something on and detaching something else.

"We need to know what we're dealing with! See if there are any… coding traps, any locked viruses."

"Ain't any. You were scanned, kid, weren't you?"

"Extensively," Prowl offered quietly from the navigator's chair. "By Prime-level medics."

"Better than anything we got. He's clean."

Unspoken was the fact that, besides giving him the best tune-up credits could buy (or rank could bribe), the little Elite smear had probably wiped Prowl's memory again for ultimate compliance. Brat seemed like the type. If that were true, Prowl was beyond clean: he was artificially perfect, freed from the trauma of a single stellar-cycle in the slave-circuit. Lockdown would almost thank the brat, if he didn't still want to crush his chamber into shrapnel. All he needed to do was upload the rest of his partner's memory banks and that would be the end he'd waited so long for.

Periodically backing up memory banks into an outside hard-drive was a practice only kept by those who knew their cores were liable to get a few hard knocks in solar-cycle-to-solar-cycle function. It was also the only thing Lockdown did religiously, mostly because he knew there was only one thing that was priceless in this existence, and it was himself: his memory banks, his capabilities and advanced personality programming. So he backed himself up no less than once every decade, protecting his most important investment: the ability to function as only Lockdown could.

Since Prowl had come into his life, he did it far, far more often and made his partner do it as well. Prowl had never questioned it. He simply stood still while Moot tucked his life into her red bundle of information every stellar-cycle, copying himself onto her innards in case he ever got on the wrong side of an electricity surge or a fist.

It chilled Lockdown to know that without that routine, so long ago turned rote, he would have lost his partner forever.

Once Lockdown debunked Torque's thread of logic (or thoughtless anxiety, as it had been so hard to simply sit and listen and _know_ as a necessary cruelty was played out mere spans away), the old femme nodded and reached behind her triangular audio, freeing a thin red cord of her own. She gestured to Prowl.

"Fine. But I'm monitoring him."

"Thank you."

That caught her off guard. She looked over and, slowly, smiled at the young bike, hardly daring to believe it. Thankfulness swept her Spark, looking at the unsure, _open_ expression on his long, sweet face, so different from the glare as he crouched in the corner.

She walked over and carefully touched the bike's rounded shoulder-plating. When that resulted in no more than a tilt of his chin, nervous expression edging on childish, she bent and wrapped him in her arms and he returned it with a sudden clutch for her, servos catching clumsily on her third wheel then tangling, almost embarrassed, with her free-swinging connection cord. She chuckled, tension of solar-cycles bleeding out.

No matter what had happened in that room, the result was more than anyone could have asked for. He was ready. Torque drew back and went to one knee, looking up into his face with a concerned expression.

"Tell me—did anyone tell you anything about the state of your memory core?" she asked softly, even as Lockdown glared at her over his spiked shoulder-plating. She touched his leg. "Any warning, anything?"

Prowl thought. He briefly remembered something Anicon had said, concerning the inability to download anything into him. To do so was… dangerous, he insisted, but it was just another ploy to cover the fact that the botanist didn't have anything—had never had anything—to download. Another begging of his safety over his happiness or knowledge.

How could he have believed such a transparent lie?

"No," he said, shaking his head. "Nothing."

She pushed a bit of air through her vents and smiled. She would only be able to sit down when Prowl was fully restored and unharmed: she had seen too many harmless downloads go awry. In fact, she'd been around so long that nothing seemed totally safe anymore. She had the right to be a little paranoid. Lockdown plunged onwards with the preparations, queuing up the deeply buried and password-protected portions of Moot's enormous hard-drive that held both his and Prowl's existences, as reduced to lines of coding and compacted memory.

Finally, or far too soon, it was ready.

Lockdown tested an adaptor, then inserted the plug into the bike's main line, right behind his audio. He felt the connection kick in with a coppery taste. A tingle of electricity coursed through his insides, followed by another shiver as Torque, after presenting the cord to him for inspection, gently hooked in. He felt pulled in two different directions for a moment, processor nearly stalling. Torque relieved the squeezed sensation by blocking her feedback, optics going orange for a moment, then offlining altogether as she located the technological registries she needed.

Lockdown watched them from the console, screen blinking with a single command: Download?

"Are you ready, Prowl?"

Prowl looked down, Spark giving one hard, apprehensive pulse that he felt to the tips of his digits. He could almost feel the shadowed mass of information hovering at the edges of his blue-white consciousness, complex and heavy. It would have been frightening, if it weren't for the two 'bots beside him, watching him carefully—not to see if he would break and run or back out, but for any sign of discomfort. They… cared about him. They always had.

This was right. He nodded, finally ready for his life, whatever it may be.

Lockdown hit the key.

* * *

His processor

blanked

as _it _hit him one stellar-cycle too late.

Three-hundred textured stellar-cycles forced their way through a tiny hot tubule and expanded into his vacant insides with the force of an exploding sun: splashing, roaring, saturating his every Spark-lit molecule with _reactions_ and sounds so loud they were colors and colors so intense they bled into his olfactory receptors.

His sensors meshed into some insane trembling spiderweb, every liquid data drop spawning vibrations that built upon and chased other

tumbling round

data-drops

around the mosaic fabric of his insides.

His CPU coasted into nothing but flat numbers as something bright and eager nearly tore inside of him, from experiencing so _much_ in a _single nanoklik_.

He felt pain, frustration and despair as a blocky red and blue 'bot turned away from him for the last time, left optic-slot scarred over by oil-clotted wires, a mirroring cancer webbing his chamber.

Fear-shame-desperation fueled his struggled against cuffs on his wrists and pedes and a deep chuckle in his audio that was twice as physical, thrice as captivating.

Sorrow was the 'bot who lay under the broken building in the middle of that silent city, brave green chassis lanced through, jig-sawed round jaw unhinged and creaking.

Two battered silver stingers caught the light and there was hatred.

There was so much, _too much_, behind him, and the darkness did not part so much as scatter and gird and wait, but still: there was light. Enough light to fight by.

He raised his fists and--

He felt devotion with a tiny organic astride him, her soft-skinned weight registering as little more than a delicate heart-rate warmth on his seat. She shouted to the winds as they raced down a grey-white path in a patch of luminous green vegetation, and the only thing that kept him from feeling anxiety was the hard covering on her head

"Prowl! Come on, don't be lame."

that he had insisted

"Sari, your father would not approve if he—"

she equip.

This covering, it looked like something called candy

"_Do you want some, Prowl?."_

rustle

"_Oh._

_Wait._

_Oops."_

and it was all he could do to compare things he did not know about to other things he barely knew anything about but he never wearied of learning.

He felt amusement, he felt quiet joy; an impossible musclecar said something he would

always remember

while hoisting him up on a breathing control panel with a true drawling smile, and he felt _change_ run by his plating like ice-blue water and heard it

settle like

stars.

He felt hope.

There was green, there was sky. A punky yellow youngling leavened a squirming furry organic in his servos. He squinted and yammered and bounced it high enough that the—_girl_—

Sari

Termsearch

Child

Female

Human

Organic

Result?

Loved

came over to scold him and Prowl gently lifted one of the miniscule creatures in his own servos, startled by the faint, reedy sound that came from its small, fanged mouth even as its porcelain-boned helplessness conquered him to his girders.

_Kittens_, his Spark told him warmly, and somewhere Lockdown's crush of mouth metamorphosed into a kiss.

The rest flew by: challenge, confusion, victory, smugness, mild annoyance. Daily, momentarily, _monumentally_, hourly he _lived_—cycles, kliks and megacycles filled him, the same in any language. A difficult, damaged old Spark was his sun, his warmth and his light. His pieces were coming together, his dislocated wishful fragments finally given leave to abandon their wearisome crouch at the bottom of his being as his real base filled in, lifting him up and up and further beyond that—until it crashed down and something crashed _in_—

mALFUNCTION—as he cried for his partner

"Get him, Fender!"

--and left--

"Consider this one your personal—"

fearfearfearfearfearfearfearfearfearfear

--a hole—

"What is…your name?"

* * *

--even as it filled space.

* * *

"Oh—oh no. _Wait_."

The ship had been utterly quiet for cycles. Prowl had been shaking minutely before due to the pure heft of the download, visor lit a ghostly blue-grey, but he began to convulse when Torque flinched and drew away, pressing one servo to her audio. Lockdown's optics snapped to her, insides freezing at the sudden wave-like change in both of them. Her unlit, blind optics turned toward him and fixed on the wall somewhere to his left, facial plating screwed up.

"He was at 612164 R-bytes and it just… jumped up to 612832, out of pace… with the download," she reported tensely, still half tied up in the information she was tracking: the utter data flood bewildered her vicariously through the connection, making it hard to find the correct words. "That's a… stellar-cycle's worth of data that's just been dumped in him."

"From where?" Lockdown demanded, red optics never wavering from the shivering model. He rose to his pedes as the rattling grew more intense, both wires swinging unsteadily from either port.

"Locked file."

"From _where_?"

His old Spark contracted, dumb fear worming in as it always did when he was promised impossible relief, but the console beeped, heralding the last stages of the transfer. A bar zoomed across the screen and, with an unheard snap, Prowl was free.

The bike immediately stiffened in the huge chair, quivering, then his arms shot out and struck at the dark space air. He struggled away, a panicked static gushing from his half-activated vocals, rough and terrified. Lockdown moved to his partner, a servo clamping on either shoulder-plate, but Prowl only arched and thrashed in the dark of his off-lined optics, away from those who sought to _touch him_.

"You're safe. You're _safe_," Lockdown roared in his blank face, servos tightening with a tense creak as he _held the other still_ and _close_ and _safe_. "You're safe, you hear me?"

Prowl's optics suddenly blazed on. Components whirring, fitful and pained, the bike's wide blue visor locked devoutly on the bounty hunter's facial plating and the convulsions dwindled to a disbelieving tremor as Lockdown reached up and gripped his chin, willing strength and silence into his partner's broken insides with the ardent burn of his optics. They looked at each another and only each other, then Prowl fell forward and grasped for his partner and Lockdown grasped back, crushing the tiny bike to his scarred chassis with a wrenching scrape of metal.

Their Sparks quailed in time and Lockdown held him so tightly it hurt, pressing him closer still when _his partner_ whispered his name--his real, 150 stellar-cycle name.

"Lockd-lockdown."

"Shut up, kid. You're safe."

Fumbling to be closer to the rock-solid mech, to his protective sun, Prowl's servos fastened around his spiked neck. Lockdown reeled, slain as deeply by the delicate plating half-crushed and shivering underneath his grip as the terrified velvet tremble of Prowl's vocals as the kid found him again.

"_Lockdown_."

"I lost you," the old mech finally rasped, struck numb by the painful reappearance of _his Prowl_. He could almost feel the memories in the other mech, giving him enough weight to stay in this dark, gravity-bare world, with him. What he'd fought for. He pushed his drawn face against Prowl's audio, old Spark fighting towards its own glowing partner, recovered from the void of space. "God damnit, I almost lost you."

Prowl's intakes hitched and he pushed back, desperate for more of the tense, rumbling musclecar: every scuffed plate, every joint, every molecule of his rough Spark. Something failed in him before he could obtain it, making Prowl's grip decay and his visor dim with a faint mechanical moan. Lockdown pulled back but Prowl locked his grip, mouth falling by the other's audio as he aspirated heavily, visor denting.

"Please. Do not leave me," Prowl whispered, then short-circuited with a soft electrical crackle, falling heavily against the bounty hunter's blank chassis.

Lockdown remained kneeling for a long moment, cradling the limp, silent body of his partner, before rising. Torque, coming as though from a world outside their own, moved forward to unplug her cord and the download cord, servo running briefly along Prowl's blank face before looking up at the old musclecar. She, responding only to the wordless, crippling emotion she saw there, whispered something about taking him back herself—about knowing how ripping it was for the two of them and she would understand.

Lockdown just shook his head and lifted Prowl's slack shell into his mangled arms as though the little bike was simultaneously made of glass but worth more than the galaxy. He walked away, into his chamber, and left Torque standing on the bridge. He lay for megacycles with the bike curled at his front, one massive servo on his partner's chamber plating, counting every new full pulse with his own old star until he could stave off recharge no more.


	51. Spiral

A/N: I'm sorryyyyyy. This arc needs to end its damn self. Two to three more chapters guys, promise. Stay with me.

Notice: next week, for no specific reason, I'm going to be **upgrading this fic to M** as I should have done a loooong time ago, so change your listing/Watch/whatever accordingly.

* * *

Spiral

* * *

The ship was quiet. Prowl rebooted at a sluggish speed, sensory feeds returning one by one in the dark. His helm rested atop Lockdown's chamber plating, vibrating from the grind of the old mech's alien innards. His Spark pulsed steadily in his heavy, indestructible frame, reassuring and grounding Prowl's own skittish center. The constant rhythm was a buffer, keeping the bike from the cold feeling that surfaced with the first activation of coding.

It had been five solar-cycles since the download: five solar-cycles too few to deal with the fact that all was not right.

Every recharge, even if Lockdown wouldn't allow anything else, Prowl couldn't stand to be as much as a room away from his partner. That steady, familiar frequency was his life-line and proof that Lockdown was beside him. Otherwise, upon rebooting in a dark, soundless room, Prowl's chamber caved and the fear was too much to bear.

He shifted, creaking lightly; Lockdown's servo cupped the cusp of his tank, pushing, and Prowl allowed himself to be shifted down beside the bounty hunter, against the mech's side. The servos stayed on him, heavy, and he looked up.

Lockdown watched him wordlessly, stark facial plating tense. He had been online for some time. After a moment, he reached up and brushed his servo along the young mech's neck cables. Testing.

Prowl leaned into the touch after an uncertain moment (and a sharp jerk of his Spark that had nothing to do with pleasure), half-shuttering his optics and giving his visor a sleepy aqua glow. Lockdown gave him a few more tests, each executed with wariness or misbegotten tenderness as he watched his tiny partner for any sign of discomfort, then ended with his pale mouth close to Prowl's. Air catching in his intakes, Prowl pushed forward, acquiescing through silence and shaking softly all the while.

The bike outpaced himself. He wanted it—craved the reconnection and the return to normalcy with equal fierceness--and his want was stronger than his fear until the careful caresses became sharp at the edges and Lockdown's plating turned truly hot underneath the bike's servos, speaking of the rumbling momentum of his core. Lockdown clutched his waist and Prowl's pistons seized painfully. He felt the full tonnage of the mech as he buried his marked face in the gap between the bike's neck and fairing. His red servo pressed firmly on his chamber plating, pushing—forcing—him against the berth, and fear exploded in Prowl's chassis.

"Lockdown, please," he whispered weakly, joints and processor locking.

Lockdown didn't hear, too absorbed in experiencing him as the mech he'd waited and strived for, finally whole and real beneath him. The involuntary roughness, the scrapes and the force, was just another part of the old bounty hunter that translated to need, to anxiety and urgency and old fear only sated by the texture of the bike's plating, but it made Prowl's processor detach and his substructure tighten viciously.

Once more, Prowl said his name, but the thick digit of Lockdown's blue claw ground over the seam of his chamber plating, making the metal buckle and he felt the intrusion, he felt the ripping sensation as pins were fractured with short snaps and the creaking crack as his plating was forced apart--

"Lockd—stop! _Stop_—"

He jerked away, plating scraping shrilly against the berth. His legs tightened and he kicked out as hard as possible, instinctively, catching Lockdown right below his chest plating. Thrown, his partner hit the floor with an echoing clang, sparks skittering away into the corners of the tiny room.

Lockdown hardly allowed himself a grunt of pain. He remained crouching until his intakes opened again, then looked up at the bike curled against the back of the berth, visor wide and petrified. His servos were crammed over his chamber plating, shielding himself as he shook. After one trembling cycle, because there was nothing to say and little more to hear besides the panicked racket of his partner's mechanics, Lockdown mechanically pushed himself to his pedes and walked out with one servo over his dented abdominal plating.

Torque looked up from her datapad when he went onto the bridge, expression immediately darkening.

"What was that?"

She had heard the ruckus. Lockdown glared down at the floor, giving a stunted gesture that only partially hid the new injury and trying to think.

The fear he had felt from Prowl was strong as a servo to his plating but still unintelligible. A wordless scream, audio-wise: he didn't understand it. It felt nervous at first, then metamorphosed so quickly, in such a writhing, visceral way, that he was given no more warning than a blow. The damned empathy he shared left him feeling just as charred and rattled as the bike and, just watching the bounty hunter search for the correct thing to say, Torque pieced it together.

"You tried to—"

She cut herself off and buried her face in her servos, nearly ill. He managed anger, rudimentary and transparent. Next came outrage: only the beginning of the fact he had given up too much for it to be this way.

"He didn't stop me!"

"Sometimes we want things we aren't ready for, Lockdown! You should have known better! Not so soon after--" She glared blankly at her data-pad for a moment then slapped it face-down, staring up at him. "Do you have any idea what they did to him?"

"He won't say two words in front of me, how the Pit am I supposed to know a damned thing?!"

"There were 'bots working the circuit. They forced him into overload. He told me. They made him overload when they abused him and took 'bots right next to him and he couldn't do a thing," she said, husky vocals shaking. She looked down, optics dimming to a dirty orange. "You can only imagine the… terror that's connected to now. It's a wonder he didn't offline you."

Lockdown's servos, big and small, clenched into fists as the anger built in him.

It was not hard and haphazard as his anger always was, nor directed at the universe at large. It was funneled inward, rotting him beneath his shaking plating. His abdominal plating throbbed with feedback, physical sensors straining to alert him of the infraction of his defenses and only compounding the hateful confusion in his old Spark, explosive and indecipherable and _unassailable_.

Never in his function had he wanted and regretted so much and so viciously; never had he thought so deeply about anything, much less a mech shivering in an adjoining room with two servos pressed to his chassis. Somewhere, in his cold banks, he could remember a time when he was nothing but scraped black plating and a new gun and a stockpile of energon and thin red optics, turned towards slowly-filling shelves with a quick, bitter hunger for more power than the universe could offer.

Spark didn't matter. Banks didn't matter. He didn't _hurt_, except for the occasional crunch of his plating, reversible with the nearest servo-ful of credits and a blowtorch: there was the hunt, the prize and the ego and the flat black void before the next hunt. Nothing else.

Then, on one green-blue backwater planet with a loose Seeker, there was a punky little bike with a quick vocalizer and a velvet smirk.

Lockdown broke from his paralysis with a wretched snarl, turning and slamming his servo into his navigator chair if just to knock some of the pain loose. Torque watched him react in the only way he knew how and shuttered her weary optics.

Lockdown was critical. Demanding. He valued strength above all else and Prowl knew that. That knowledge only added to the thorn of his silence: the bike shivered and shied in his small room, refusing to speak of the tragedies he endured for fear of seeming weak to the mech he loved above all else.

It seemed the last blow Lockdown was capable of taking. He had been forced into a low-level merge with a terrified youngling and, regardless of whether they had finally regained Prowl, function was never going to be the same and he felt it in every aching part of him. His Spark roared and roared the futility of continuing in this dark world. Considering all that he had sacrificed, he might turn his anger in a bad direction--but she couldn't allow him to place blame on the only hope they had.

She rose to her pedes, walking over and reaching up to his spiked shoulder-plating. He tensed at the touch then jerked away from her, motor shrieking.

"Everyone has their moments of weakness, Lockdown. This was not his fault, nor is it yours," she said as firmly as she could. When he only stood, unhearing and perhaps uncomprehending, she took his arm and forced him to face her. He glared at her with blank, helpless rage, not even seeing the old femme, freshly repaired tensors creaking and twisting. "He endured cruelty that would drive a lesser mech to insanity. He is trying his best, for you and for himself. Give him time and do not hate him for this."

His beastly face fell. His anger dissolved but so did his strength—there was a vital line between the two emotions, stored so long as energon or coolant beneath his fearsome plating in the dark millennia where he had no need of anything else. She could almost feel the sickness flood him, orchestrating the buckling of his massive shoulders and back-struts.

"Can't," he rasped, optics guttering. She nodded, knowing it to be true. After a moment, he shook his head. "Didn't mean t'scare him."

She didn't have to say anything more. A gentle push towards Prowl's room was all that was needed. She watched him go and shook her head, resettling with her data-pad near the red glass of the vista; her optics fixed on the blackness of space and all the paths ever taken, blurry Spark shrinking at the twisting cruelties of their own.

To see him feeling was a triumph after so many stellar-cycles, but one barely visible through the breadth of his pain.

* * *

He felt his world fray when the file came unlocked.

Prowl regarded his half stellar-cycle of ignorance as an impossible alternate reality, but not only due to Anicon. How could he have… functioned, so cleanly, so _naively_, with this waiting inside him? Locked as the file was, did it not cause paralyzed brown ripples in his recharge, foul his Spark with fear?

No. He continued, unaware; concerned only with his fragmented existence and the tiny mech who failed to meet his every escalating expectation. He had only felt a shadow of the fear and the loss of willpower when the Direct Command software was activated. Now, that same terror waited at the surface of his banks like an oily film.

He had been tortured. Reduced to chattel or equipment, he was left with his limbs held taught and heavy for weeks with no contact and violent contact when so. The polluted energon, the inability even to offline his sensors, unending solar-cycle to brown, buzzing, fearful solar-cycle. The sensation of emptiness, the lack of hope, it had no equal.

After a point, the memories made little to no sense. He was so delirious and starved by then that his sensory feed should have been scrambled, but the lack of comprehensible logic and flow made the experiences even more terrifying. Senseless sensations, jolts of pain and violation: because they had no logical roots, they needed no memory trigger. They could surface up at any time and flood his sensors with ghost stimuli, making him lock up and perhaps fall to one knee, scrambling into a shadow to ride out the tremors.

Burdened, Prowl sat in the only home he had craved for a stellar-cycle and simply stared into space.

To anyone watching, the trauma of it was visible: a steady heartless buzz, as numbing and decomposed as the buzz of all those dying mechs in flat chorus around him, screaming just as he was but unable to purge it from their cage of a body. He did not smile. He simply existed, sitting in corners and tucked against his partner's side, unsure and horribly quiet—no longer cunning Prowl's 'waiting' quiet, or his 'learning' quiet, but dead, detached quiet.

Torque spent time with him when he wasn't by Lockdown, simply holding him and letting him feel safe and accepted for all the dirty pain in his joints, underneath his plating, imbedded in his Spark. He talked to her in fits and bursts, unable to manage more than a few sentences at a time. One solar-cycle, after one of many endless stretches of silence, Prowl looked at the old femme, digits ceasing their rote exploration of the sigil still shining on his front.

"Is this what I deserve?" he asked softly, vocals emitting a brief, piteous crackle of static. Torque took one look at his slack face and dimmed visor and moved over to him, reaching up to cup his chin.

"What?" she demanded, harder than she should have, then shook her head fiercely. "No. No. It was senseless. Senseless and awful and no fault of yours. This—that place, that system—it wasn't in Primus' plan. It's… unnatural, Pit-spawned. There is _no question of deserving anything_ so don't you dare think that way, Prowl. How could you possibly—_possibly_ think that—"

"For leaving them to die."

She quieted. Prowl's optics were directed beyond her by little more than a blank inch. He refreshed his vocals, pain evident in the angle of his visor.

"I abandoned them when they needed me."

"Who, love?" Torque asked after a long silence, protective burst stilled by the tremble in his vocals.

"My… friends."

Sentences bleeding into jerky, difficult silences, he described them to her. Optimus, the solemn, sheepish, _learning_ leader. Bumblebee, the brat with a bigger engine than a processor, but a bigger Spark than both if it could be teased out in a moment of surprise. Bulkhead, slow and sweet and thoughtful. Ratchet, the grudging veteran. Sari, the soft-skinned alien who captured them all even as they held her in their servos. Torque listened as though she would take them into her, along with the pain he felt in recreating them for her Spark's eye.

They had taken a large part of his Spark, through the many stellar-cycles since they found him on that asteroid, alone and angry. It had taken yet more to abandon them, much less for selfish sake of his own function. They darkened, yes; they became cold, yes, but they were only products of the desperate war raging around and within them—not at all worthy of callous abandonment, but of loyalty and perseverance.

They fought for freedom. In the end, Prowl only fought for himself.

Prowl did not want to think too deeply on why his altered self was so reluctant to believe Lockdown even as the words—his story, the false red symbol on his chassis—struck such a terrifying chord within him. He spoke with the pain and guilt he had kept hidden from his partner for decades, trembling with the needed violence of finally purging so many memories and doubts. Finally, he bowed and let the old femme hold him and stroke his bare helm.

"I should have stayed with them," he murmured, seeing their faces and moments all too clearly with his helm cupped against the old femme's chassis. Regret of stellar-cycles stole him and voided all else, even the warmth of his partner's chamber. "Ended with them."

"But you are here, and not by chance. You should not have ended with them. You were meant to go on. Perhaps… perhaps your disappearance gave your friends the last thing they needed to overcome the Lord Protector," Torque said haltingly, searching for more words to fill the void within him; to protect the sweet bike in some measure from his own deeds. "Perhaps if you had stayed, they would not have found the power to win."

He shook his head. It was long past. He could not help it, but neither could he put it to rest. He thought he had forgiven himself. He had not. Torque's servo grazed his Autobot sigil; above him, her optics dimmed to a sorrowful orange.

"It's painful, I know. Facing up to the loss of life... it's more than most can bear, but you have a life here and the least you can do is live it—take it as the gift it is. You have Lockdown. He treasures you."

He straightened from her tender clutch, charred to his core. Torque watched him, facial plating buckling at the bike's fathomless expression, thin visor once more turned toward a dark corner.

"He loves you more than anything and he would do anything for you," she said, growing more intense as he merely stared into the shadows. She took his shoulder-plating, vocals tight, fighting to make the bike see what had been before--what he had _changed_ by simple presence and love and will-power. "What would have become of him, had you not gone with him? You were meant to come here and teach him!"

Determinism. One of the core tenets of Circuit-su.

Everything happens for a reason. Every action provokes an equal and opposite reaction—and that reaction should be heeded as the fruit of our actions and accepted as just truth. Karma. Prowl's visor dented and he smiled for the first time and it broke her Spark.

"And my capture? This was preordained—some divine will?"

She could find nothing to say to that. For the hundredth time and the fiercest time, she was struck by the selective senselessness of the universe, the bestial crash of the stars and the dark. They sat, together but alone, for many cycles. They thought over lives lost in the pursuit of good and lives delivered from that same pursuit. They thought of cost; of the line between self-preservation and unforgivable selfishness, all weighed and metered by the scope of the greater good.

"It was a good cause," Prowl said sorrowfully, nearly to himself.

"Just because it was good doesn't mean it was yours." Torque took his servo, finding his hidden optics and holding them as she continued, soft and steady, "We all find a place in the universe, Prowl. There are always heroes. There were heroes enough to win that war, and now they are at peace."

"It was not my war," he whispered. "And it is not my peace."

He left his servo cupped in hers but withdrew with a faint buzz of his visor, Spark dwindling to an injured star. She reached forward and held the young bike as tightly as she could, but it did no good. He had disappeared inside of himself.


	52. In the End

A/N: Skim-read this chapter D: Seriously. I hate it.

I sincerely apologize for the angst, the length, and all the freakin Torque. Without her, this would all be horribly cramped introspection, so… consider her melodrama a necessary evil :[ Enhhh. ENNHHHH DON'T MAKE ME REGRET CREATING YOU DARLING.

First off, the name of the game here is 'don't trust Lockdown'—denial is his favorite hobby and he's had a freakin' _long_ time to work on blocking out and distancing himself from certain memories, and making other 'bots believe it too. Yeeeeah. Torque's playing it safe and _playing along _for simple want of trying to make Lockdown understand the truth.

Oh god. Canon. Iactuallyrespectyou.

_Two_ more chapters, and one of them is nicenice. Then... blessed equilibrium and a return to spotty and adorable one-shottage. Ohgoditsoundsdelicious.

COUNTING DOWN!

* * *

In the End

* * *

"_Gotta get it out of him."_

When she called in to check on them—a month's worth of silent hunts had passed since her fifteen solar-cycle stay on their ship—Lockdown wouldn't speak to her. Torque didn't press. Right before the huntress terminated the fruitless comm-call, however, he suddenly asked her to reroute to an old datapad he had and she did so with only an ounce of hesitation; when the screen activated, it showed the scratched-up interior of his quarters, which she knew was soundproofed.

Whether the seed of nausea took root then or later, it was hard to say. It was impossible to tell through her overwhelming anxiety, or the sick sensation she felt when seeing Lockdown's slack facial plating up-close from a static-torn screen. If it was hard leaving them alone, it was doubly hard to return. If the old 'bot thought to keep herself from anguish by staying away from intimate relationships, she consistently neglected to consider the pain of those dear to her--those 'bots she watched as attentively as though she could live through them by mere presence and tender investment, a grasping, voyeuristic habit no amount of millennia could break.

The two bounty hunters were silent—such dense, dark silence that she considered ending the new call herself because he just wasn't ready, he needed more time alone with Prowl--and then he said that, sudden and rough. She looked at the musclecar carefully, optics thinning slightly as her processor reached, connoted, stretched. He waited in front of his screen in the half-dark, one servo obscuring his ghostly facial plating.

"You have to get what out of him? The Direct Command software?" she asked at length, suddenly dreading the answer.

"Everythin'."

His vocals weren't weak, nor as pained as his creaking slump against the back wall of his berth, but the raw, paralyzed desperation in them still caused her insides to crumple.

"Lockdown. I'm sorry. It doesn't… work like that. You know that."

"Just the time he was gone. Just the circuit," he muttered fiercely, almost to himself. He gestured jerkily at the air, gaze trained on the opposite wall. "Ain't much. Get that out and he'll be fine."

He was in shock. The rigidity of his mechanics, the blank fierceness in his optics as his processor churned overtime, running in cramped circles and trying to find a solution to something that could never fully be solved. It was expectable. It was his first time trying to resume life with his broken partner, and hope would not arrive in a mere month. He had no escape from the other mech's pain, nor the new connection between them; anyone would quail at such an intimidating healing slope. The new reality was ugly, even if they were together.

Shock was one thing, but the thought that he could simply extract all the pain from his partner, like it was a virus or a chipped gear… it was so natural of him. Lockdown could deal with tangles of wires, but not the Spark-warm emotions those wires conducted like liquor or fire, especially when he could feel every seismic upset in his own old Spark. But it was impossible to affect the pain in any physical way. He couldn't simply take it away, it was in Prowl's banks and nothing would—

"Wait. Are you talking about… altering his memory?" Torque asked, plating warped in disbelief.

"Just a stellar-cycle. Ain't much," Lockdown repeated, vocals reduced to a static-thick rasp. He shook his helm doggedly, pressing a digit between his gapped dentals.

"What--no. How could you—"

There were many questions, half of them incredulous and rhetorical, only tailored to purge her pure disbelief because a month wasn't enough to pass judgment _or_ give up hope, but she stopped at the fact that put an end to all of it.

"That's drastic. Too drastic—and he won't agree to it, Lockdown," she said tensely. "He'll never agree."

Lockdown knew that already, somewhere inside him. That's why he hadn't said anything about it.

He knew that if he went to Prowl and asked him—asked him if he wanted to leave behind something that was keeping him from the rest of his function, that was senseless and barbaric and kept him crouching in his room for solar-cycles, servos clamped over his chamber in fear of his own damned circuitry—Prowl would simply look at him, wordless as always, and _feel_ so strongly that Lockdown would need to put a servo to his own chamber, a sorrow not his own instantly worming past all of the hard plating he had spent a lifetime creating.

To the kid, it wouldn't be right. It was part of him and, just like the scar, Prowl didn't erase parts of himself. Even if they were killing him.

Lockdown sneered, nothing but a rote contraction of facial plating.

"Don't matter. His slaggin' obsession with not scuffin' a few bumps away doesn't mean a thing to me. This is bigger. I'll get him t'do it. Knock him out if I need to."

"No, it's more than that, Lockdown. It's more than, what, preference or superstition or _want_. It's—it's against his code of calling," she insisted, gesturing helplessly at the dark green night sky of whatever planet she was on. His engine slowed to a dirty whine.

"His what?" he asked guardedly, too slowly for comfort.

"Religion," Torque admitted finally, all too ready for the darkening of the old mech's optics and the scornful crackling pressure in his raw vocalizer.

"Prowl's too sharp to waste his function on somethin' like that," he growled in disgust, beastly head turning away. Torque pressed her thick digits to her optic crest in something like wounded impatience, vocals tightening.

"You j—Lockdown, do you think he spends all of his time meditating for nothing?"

Yes. No. Maybe. Lockdown thought. All this time, it seemed like nothing more than something Prowl _did_.

It only took a quick trip to his banks to remember the bike knotted up and perched primly on a berth or an outcropping of alien landscape a thousand times before, humming so softly and so warmly the impatient musclecar could only feel it in the tips of his spikes. He never considered what his partner was accomplishing by the recurring and ever-present ritual—foolish, as sharp little Prowl was always tirelessly working toward something --but the fact that it could be tied into his _beliefs_ suddenly sent a prickle of vexation and sick, sick apprehension underneath his black plating.

Gathering his spikes around himself like the weapons they were, he was about to growl something but Torque interrupted him, one flat magenta servo taking up most of the comm-screen.

"Does he still practice?"

The look on Lockdown's marked facial plating told her that his last peaceful memories of the little bike included careful ritualistic meditation and sinuous Metallikato exercises, crafted to keep his stablizers attuned to his liquid needs. She nodded, cementing it before he had room to deny it.

"Then he still believes. You cannot possibly have one without the other. In all schools, it is the same, even my own."

"What does yours say about this?" he demanded after a long moment, glaring hatefully at the old femme—as though she were furthering this propaganda by her simple, eons-old existence. As though she, at least, should know better. She took the venom with a shake of her head.

"When you're speaking of manipulating your partner's memories, much less against his wishes?" she demanded, then paused, shuttering her optics to steady herself. "We still operate from the… basic hypertexts."

"You ain't allowed to fix what's wrong?"

"We are not allowed to interfere with the flow of natural events as they occur."

When Lockdown only rumbled in a poisonous timbre, looking away as his scratched segmented back-plating rippled involuntarily--all signs of the withdrawal of his attention and deadly impatience, both things lethal to Prowl at this delicate stage—she blew some air from her vents with a rough noise, heart-shaped face mournful.

"Lockdown, I know you think this is… no time for lessons in the metaphysical, but there's something you must understand about the way we were taught. It will help you understand why Prowl can't do this, even past the cost and the danger."

He simply looked at her through their small data-pad window, optics throbbing a dull, hostile red as he glared past the scratches on the screen; no longer bristling but no longer caring. She gathered her words for a minute, picking the right ones for him, but still looked at him in some base confusion before she began.

"The definition of sentience is varied, but there are those who still deny that we have centers—Sparks or connections, or a _purpose_ beyond what we were crafted to do originally. We do not exist in the traditional definition of Being, in that we are… machines, technically, with advanced programming, mechanics and software, all of which are the components of artificial intelligence, something that, while impressive, actually denies a race recognition of their existence and validity by the universe at large. Artificial intelligence is still artificial. We are not.

"Whereas most beings fancy themselves spawned by some divine deity, but are in fact the process of evolution, we are actually made, part by part, program by program. Things have advanced since then, but we can identify our original makers and half of the galaxy scorns us because of it, believing our Primus-sent sentience to be nothing but a glitch in, what, unimaginably complex programs. There is a reason we don't interact much with other races: they think themselves above us, simply because we are the most fully inorganic creatures in existence and there are no other records of fully sentient mechanical beings."

"And?" he grunted coldly when she stopped, her yellow optics fixed anxiously on his dark expression. He heard her mechanics whine; her shoulder-plating dropped an inch, tired.

"And altering memories goes against everything we are, Lockdown, and everything we have been trying to prove for billions of stellar-cycles. Have you thought about how utterly insubstantial our experiences become—how insubstantial _we_ become—when we can simply hook in and erase anything to our liking? Re-write our own realities?"

She asked it gently, husky vocals nearly fizzling out as she pointed upwards, to the stars and the gaping green-black chasm of space that littered the top half of her com-screen. She looked at the old musclecar as though she would reach his injured Spark from thousands of light-years away, warm him with the downy strength of her own by words and glowing yellow alone.

"We must submit to the flow of the universe. We must experience without choice. It is that one symbolic helplessness that earns us the right as sentient beings, and without that, Primus cannot give us our full potential. It is our divine state."

_"--and we must accept pain if there is to be any growth. We must accept strife and confusion if there is to be triumph and peace. We began as machines, objective and flawlessly logical, before He Sparked us: why else would we feel pain, confusion, fear, if it did not serve a greater purpose? Primus is not so cruel, my students."_

_Compact black limbs slid through the thin air, with not a gear creak to their name; a subsonic hum of utter tranquility traveled up and down deep, masculine notes, making smiling music—music for his slow-shifting frame, music for his pure, strong Spark. His pedes made no noise when they touched the dojo floor, as often as they rose and fell in perfect time with his words._

_"You must have faith. Faith is your greatest comfort and your strongest defense. There is no ultimate equation to function, but there is meaning in everything. There is something to learn from every misfortune and we are intended to learn it by Primus. To deny that is to deny ourselves and Him. Continue to do as you were crafted, young ones—but go forth and feel as He would have you."_

_And the old mech stilled after a final whir of his mechanics, smiling with a humble, knowing__ grace that calmed every kneeling 'bot in front of him, assuring them of their own triumphs over eventual pain; their fortitude against such destructive poisons as anger, ego, resentment and hatred. His message washed over them in waves of understanding, like silk or liquid malleable infinite__ chrome before it was set into a mold for a protoform, and they were young and glowing with the radiation of his ages-old love and goodwill and quiet power that seemed to echo like Primus himself—_

"It is law. He can't compromise _himself_, his sense of being, even if it seems like the better option. That's why he was so upset to realize his memories had ever been wiped, even when he regained himself. Do you see how it is, Lockdown?"

_--except for the heavy black mech at the back who couldn't pay attention through the tortured creak of his bulky knee joints in that wretched crouch and he heard every word but the gnawing pain didn't stop and he didn't—_

"—ockdown?"

_-- feel peace for the hundredth time and it didn't make sense _for the thousandth time _and he hated, Primus but he _hated--

"It's fraggin' idiotic is what it is!" Lockdown burst out ferociously, with no simple irritation but a deep, learned anger that the other 'bot saw as strongly as shimmering heat.

It built her own outrage faster, her hot vapors rising as sharply as Lockdown's volume when the mech threw down the datapad with a heavy clatter, sending her screen spinning off into a cockeyed view of the half-lit ceiling. The grind of his vocals were farther away but all the more mangled and ugly for the tinny distance.

"Why the Pit would a mech—a damn smart mech, a _practical_ mech--put so much time into some virused dead-end cult?"

"Lockdown—"

"Doesn't make any fraggin' sense, ain't _logical_. Restrictions, training, _meditation_—and for what? All for some promise of another plane and a god who never shows up until you're safe in the well and what fraggin' good is that? Sticky mass-input programming, that's all it is. That's _all it is_, no better than factions. Mech doesn't need that, he just needs his gears. S'just another way to control when all y'need to know is how to fight, all you need to know is how to beat the other 'bot's chamber in and even if it wasn't gonna keep him from fixin' himself I'd _still_—"

"Lockdown! Stop acting like this!" Torque barked, breaking the roar of his words by sheer volume and ferocity alone, unseen yellow optics flashing. "It isn't as if you're entirely ignorant!"

Lockdown froze mid-stride, red optics wide and blank as his processor locked. The datapad was silent, only crackling fitfully from the blow it took, then her vocals came from the damaged speakers again, far-away and hard.

"… You practiced."

"What're you talkin' about?" Lockdown said stiffly, optics averted even as she couldn't see him; even as he was alone in the dark room, servos slowly clenching and unclenching with his Spark steadily shrinking like someone had pried off his chamber and left the empty space between the stars to suck it out.

"I've known it for millennia—but only because I've had time to watch. Anyone else… I don't flatter myself, but your style has…diverged so heavily, no one else would catch it. Prowl would not. Has not. You never said a word, so neither did I." Torque vented air again, all anger decayed into exhaustion. She paused long enough to let him swallow his own exposure. "What school did you belong to?"

Briefly, Lockdown's visual field quailed, perception and resolution fluctuating wildly—only the slightest sign of the burst of chaos spawned by his suffocated Spark and the sudden involuntary activation of his deepest memory banks. He remained silent for a long time. Torque waited.

"Alkaline," he said finally, hating the sound of it.

"Prowl's dojo," she murmured. "How did you—"

"There's a reason we don't ask each other questions, gal," he interrupted her with a beaten growl, shocked into movement at the dangerous _connection_ made by a single sharp processor a thousand light-years away: his haphazard steps echoed in the small room, even as she couldn't see him digging at his spikes and neck plating, gritting his dentals. "Not unless you wanna do what you should've done ages ago. Pack up and leave me right here. Me and the kid."

"I love you. I will always stay with you."

"You're a fraggin' romantic. Hopeless. Pathetic and _stupid_. Always will be, no matter how many more millennia you manage to whimper and crawl through," he snapped in disgust, resisting the urge to stride over to the upturned datapad and crunch it in his claw and end her tender husky monotone; crush the old femme along with it with a single crackle-snap of fiberglass. Hatred and fear coupled in his dim chamber, roughening his vocals, forcing him to spit more out. "Your goddamn Spark's gonna get you off-lined one solar-cycle and I'm gonna laugh and thank your fraggin' Primus you finally had the sense to _die_."

"That may be," Torque said quietly. He could almost see the flat line of her full mouth below the fathomless orange of her almond optics. "But I promise you: I will never turn you away, Lockdown, no matter what you did before I met you. It is only what you do here and now that can make me leave you, and even that will be a battle."

_"Rust in the Pit, old mech," and the helmet was so goddamn heavy in his servos._

Lockdown leaned against the far wall, mechanics suddenly sagging under the weight of her words and the churn of his old Spark. He offlined his optics for a moment, shutting out the claustrophobic room and the tiny, shivering bike on the other side of the wall, who was catching his raw emotions like trembling sonic booms inside of his scratched-up chamber and worrying, worrying, worrying…

"Some things you just can't promise, gal. Don't press your luck."

This wasn't about him. Never had been.

The speakers buzzed when he picked the datapad up from the floor, settling heavily on his berth again. Torque studied him without a word, angular facial plating radiating sorrow. Lockdown ground his servo along his helm, vents hissing slightly, then texted it to her because he couldn't say it.

_Kid's dying in his own processor. Something's gotta give._

After a moment, Torque nodded. Her entire function had been built off of beings, no matter how rare, needing her. It was the only way she survived, in between long stretches of blackness. Taking a steadying cycle of metal-heavy alien air, she started talking.

"You need to give him more time. You can't just… expect these things to be fixed. It's only been a month, Lockdown, what kind of recovery did you expect in such a short span? Especially after what he lived through."

"I'm tellin' you, this won't change. This is permanent."

"It will never go away, yes, but it will lessen with the right help! You need to have _faith_ in him. You need to wait with him, help him, it's_--_"

They talked in circles. They talked about Prowl's pain: Torque asked questions, Lockdown nodded or shook his head, growling out answers occasionally, always with the same hollow look in his optics. No matter how many platitudes Torque offered—her words were reduced to trite cinders because she could say nothing that would _fix_ Prowl--the only thing he was focused on was altering Prowl's memory. Saving the mech from himself and that one evil stellar-cycle tainting all the kliks before and behind the two mechs. He asked about it so many times she finally thought about it, Spark hurting—just to get it out of his processor and onto the longer, far more arduous task of healing his partner.

"Can't… the EMP generator—can't that scramble memory somewhat?" she asked reluctantly, full mouth sad.

"Too unpredictable. Too wide-range. Blasts usually wipe out half a bot's processor and not the side you want. Jacks with personality programming too."

Their options ran out too fast, even if Lockdown was the only one truly thinking about it. There was a too long stretch of silence that became all too short when he actually spoke, hard and flat.

"We'll have to hack him."

It was as though Torque had been physically assaulted; a plug pulled, a tube yanked free from its socket, a piston slammed askew. All the color bleached from her optics before flashing an alarm yellow.

"No. You can't."

"I can and I will," Lockdown growled, hardly glancing up at her; the cruel, raw edge to his vocals betrayed the painful clench of his substructure. "He won't say yes but it's gotta come out. No other option."

"Lockdown, listen to me: you can't. If you care about Prowl in the slightest, you will not subject him to that. Nothing—_nothing_--is worth that."

Her vocals shook. He looked up, red optics reduced to slivers.

"You been hacked?"

"No."

"Then you've got no say."

"You have no idea what it consists of. I've seen it happen."

"Ain't the safest thing but it works—" he began, vocals rising momentarily before he glared at her. "Why're you so shifty about this?"

"I had…" she croaked, then trailed off, intakes catching as she put a servo to her helm with a faint mechanical whine. "No. I can't. I'm sorry, I can't."

The gutted musclecar started to say something, growl rising impatiently and almost hatefully, but she shook her head, putting up her other servo with a bluntness he didn't expect.

"I can't tell you," she said, grip shifting meaningfully to her auditory unit. "But I can show you. If you'll let me."

Steady as anything, she was offering a file transfer. He would have been shocked if he weren't so damn tired: no one could have paid him to view her memory files under any normal basis. They didn't ask each other questions, much less play voyeur to each other's messy experiences. But this had to do with Prowl—what he was planning on subjecting Prowl to, for sake of his function.

"Why?" he ground out.

"Because you need to know what could happen."

After a long, long pause, Prowl's exhaustion and low throb of anxiety filtering through their connection like a mortal wound, Lockdown nodded curtly.

Her optics dimmed to mournful flickering fireflies as her internals whirred, starting and stopping with difficulty, body preternaturally still under the night sky. After a few cycles, her optics returned to her original yellow, but her body kept the artificial aching shell-like stiffness as she snapped back a bit of paneling from her helm and drew out a thin black cord, plugging it into her data-pad at the bottom port.

"I've isolated it the best I can."

She stripped the abstract—emotional—data for him. She was at least that considerate.

Now he would be left with a scene as viewed by what they were without the claustrophobic glow of a Spark: objective machines. He unhooked a download cable from the old datapad, checking it briefly to see if it was compatible, then snapped it behind his auditory port. He felt the connection go live with a tinny electrical taste; the download was quick, straight into his cache memory. He disconnected and, without looking at the old femme, accessed the new file.

He knew right then, from the very first electronic tone, she lied.

The lines of abstract code were not just a brilliant, frantic undercurrent but a wrenching force—so much so that the rest of him (him, Lockdown, the hollow and scratched-up mech sitting stiffly against the wall with his black plating hovering a thousand miles away) locked up, throwing up firewalls at the outright invasion of another's picaresque consciousness. The defense effectively trapped the musclecar inside of himself, and _he_ flooded whatever voided processor there was to flood.

Small room. Very small. No air. Badly lit—only glow from the scattered screens, flickering lettering and flickering _Spark_.

A femme—his femme, her femme, _she_ still had a broad shoulder-span and a thin mouth and heavy pedes—lay on an operating berth, slender arms to her sides. Glider model, bright green. Willowy, precious. Her big blue optics were guttered out, sick with back-up lighting. Sick like before, no change from when she was sitting with her servos clamped around her arms, staring into space.

She was sick. Needed this. Only option.

It was a constant battle not to touch her. Run thick digits along her sides, lift her paralyzed weight and press her to his chassis. He ached. Primus, he ached. But knowing that she wouldn't look at him anyways, wouldn't _be held_ even if she were--

He shouldn't have done this. He kept turning over what he'd said to her in his processor, the lies just to get her into stasis. She was so scared. No one could live, being that terrified, but that hardly justified the wires pouring from her helm and her blank face, her strapped limbs. He shouldn't have done this.

He didn't know what he should have done (waited, trusted, loved, stayed, _tried_), but it wasn't this.

He paced, anxiety choking him, wringing every wire raw. The hacker didn't talk to him, prepping the programs and infiltration devices. Had to keep himself from jerking at every noise.

Fear. Guilt. Self-hatred. Look at her. Look at her. Anxiety, _ache_--

_--a mech convulsed and a datapad clattered to the floor, white lips retracting in a involuntary snarl, far-away yellow optics unwavering behind the fiberglass—_

A time-skip. Who knew how long he waited, but the dark-plated 'bot (squat, sharp plating, no visible optics) plugged in and for the longest time there was nothing but silence as the hacker's plating shifted almost organically, tiny slats undulating. He felt the energy field grow. Tainted, hectic—almost excited. Then she started shaking.

It was nothing. The next message appeared on the screen, bright flickering green: it is nothing it is nothing stay away do not touch.

He could hear her plating clanking and tense stripes of grey sliced the monitors and _it was nothing_.

Then it wasn't nothing anymore. He felt something snap even if he didn't see it or hear it, and his femme started shaking, energy field ballooning and quailing madly, curdling into crackling black pain underneath her delicate plating. He was alone in that room, in intent and any other logical sense, but he stepped toward the small hacker regardless, raising his husky vocals above the shrieking equipment.

"What's happening?"

The hacker didn't move. He didn't move even when she suddenly screamed, long and piercing and unwavering, one anguished audiobit blasting out of her tattered vocalizer and saturating every dark iota of that unlit room. Her digits twitched, then she arched off the table with her elegant helm thrown back, followed by rough spasms as tensors started contracting at random, the product of mechanical-level chaos.

"She's—no! Stop it! Tell me what's happening!"

He couldn't _stand it_, very Spark roaring forward at its casing to get at her; when her vocals cracked out and her head snapped to the side, he charged forward and ripped the wires out of her helm ports, un-strapping her limbs and heaving her into his arms, safe in his arms. She went rigid, convulsing against him. He fell to the floor and the palpitation of her wounded Spark nearly locked him as well; it was so hysterical that his own clenched to a sick fistful of light.

He rotted, from that dense center, feeling all of his wrongs in a single moment. He felt the squeal of metal as he crushed her to him, nearly deaf and blind; she was radiating so much heat. She was lighter from having something inside her seared away, singed black and unsalvageable. His insides mirrored hers, curling and black. Paneling unhinged, scraped, creaking from her beautiful helm, ports singed. It was his fault, he'd—destroyed her—

--audio bits, smoke—static--

"_Tell me what's hap-hap-hap-hap-hap-happening_!"

She stilled.

Her Spark pulsed on, fast and shallow—then, nanoklik by nanoklik, it began to lose rhythm. It decayed into random bursts of energy, radioactive decay, and he pushed his thick servos over her little body, knowing the chaotic death-keen of a dwindling Spark. But that anguished, senseless state did not peter into silence.

Cradled against his empty chassis, she rebooted with a violent snap of static, optics burning blue, and clawed at his facial plating.

He cried out, jerking away. Half of his visual field blanked out with a crunching sound and a pulse of pain; she scrambled away, all clumsy animal clunks in the darkness. By the time he struggled to his pedes, clutching his bleeding optic-slot, she was at him again, glitching and swiping at him with viciousness only borne of a seared processor, limbs propelled by a messy, frenzied culmination of glitches and distorted reality. Her elegant facial plating was twisted in pain even as she turned the table over without a sound and leapt for him, mechanics squealing.

His depth-perception was fighting to recalibrate, only heightening his panic—he crashed into a screen, sparks burst from behind his back and she hissed deep in her vocalizer--he had to strike without harming her, doggedly, he had to--

She couldn't be stopped. She was destroyed but still moving but still _hatingfearingdying_, in the throes of a self-detonation that never took off. He fought, as best he could and as long as he could. He was dribbling energon all over the floor and down his heart-shaped facial plating by the time he caught her in his arms, crushed her servos to her sides and drove his fist into her chamber.

His digits twitched around and within her orange-white Spark before it simply stopped.

He went to his knee-plating, lowering her limp body to the ground. Optics black. His servo cooled with her dark chamber, frozen. The ruins of her chamber plating—her shattered chamber—crunched and shifted around his scratched forearm. He drew his servo out. Glass crunched.

Scorch marks on his fist. One digit non-operational, magenta plating ripped loose by a chamber-pin.

Her face was not blank.

**Fast-forward-standing-up.**

"I got in. I got in."

Dark bot. No face. No name, just a price.

He was dazed from having the connection terminated so quickly, when she was ripped out of his network. That half-lusty look on his not-face. He got off from the rush of invading her. The hacker put up his servos, vocals flat and trembling.

"Did what you asked me to. I got past her firewalls, just like you asked."

He stepped toward the 'bot. Another step. Another. Then a rush—his servos were in the hacker's neck wiring and his crushable body was against the wall and _she_ was tearing at him, screaming her grief—

White.

For a long time, Lockdown stared at her angled image—nothing but a magenta and yellow blur--where the scuffed datapad had clattered to the floor from his numb servo. His vocals were frozen, blocked at the wires. He leaned forward and picked the pad up. Torque's sculpted mouth was heavy, expression beyond solemn, hedging on dead.

He had to tear the next excuse out of his churning fuel cells, seeing Prowl flat on a table.

"You were practically in the steam age then. Slag like that doesn't happen now."

"It does. It does and it will," she said icily. "They're barbaric, twisted ego junkies who only do it to defeat 'bots in their own processor. They don't care about the souls they hack at, they don't _care_."

"They do if you give 'em enough credits."

"And those are credits you don't have! Your accounts are nearly sapped and this is not a goddamn numbers game: no amount of credits is going to guarantee Prowl's safety. You are risking the one thing you hold dear in this function in a—a gamble that Prowl would never forgive you for anyways, even if he survives it! "

The terror as that willowy green 'bot started shaking on the table—as though she were being attacked at her bleeding Spark, someplace that should never be pried open—was still fresh in his banks. He was shaken by what he'd seen. It was the abstract that did it. Somewhere in him, he hated Torque for doing it, but her second-hand emotions drowned even the prickly betrayal.

"What happened?" he asked at length, deep vocals little more than a wounded vibration. It took her a moment to register what he meant. The old femme shook her head.

"He pressed her, trying to get into her banks. She fought back. We didn't know much about… I didn't know much about firewalls, that much is true. I didn't think that she would have hers sky-high and triple layered, terrified as she was of… everything. I wanted to fix her. Have her love me again, I suppose, if everything was going to be perfect afterwards."

She smiled bitterly.

"I thought it was the only option I had left. It never was. The hacker followed my orders—I didn't know what I wanted, I just wanted her fixed. So he just… _did_ it, without considering her as a patient, without—" Shaken, she covered her optics, then pinned Lockdown with a painfully clear glare, ending sharply, "Do you truly want to risk Prowl's life over this?"

He thought about it, rumbling, wounded, and pressed his beastly white face into his mismatched servo. She watched him, simply waiting--then waiting for the right time. Her vocals were tremulous when she finally spoke, every word built on a mixture of faith and fear where it was impossible to tell which was stronger.

"Perhaps… perhaps he's right, love. What he—what we believe. As horrible as it is, maybe there is something to learn from this."

There was a long pause. Lockdown ended it with a tired wheeze of his vents, every millennia aching on his plating as he realized what she was saying.

"You want me t'settle down with him. Keep him safe."

All he had to do was look at her, because they both knew it was impossible. This was his way of life and he couldn't support another 'bot and himself. But she was desperate and so was he.

"It's difficult to think about, but… I'm saying you can use this to grow together. I'm saying he doesn't need a hack, Lockdown, he needs _you_."

"He won't remember it. Won't remember the hack or anything before it, and then he'll have a clean slate," he muttered, once more dark and hard. Whatever switch had been flicked inside of him, it was permanent. He looked at the old femme, optics rekindling. "He can't function like this. He can't and you know it."

It wouldn't be an option if the only issue was Prowl's pain--or Lockdown being unwilling to deal with it. It wasn't so. Prowl was literally unrecoverable. Lockdown very rarely felt things to the core of his being: this was a feeling he couldn't block out, much less argue against. For all intents and purposes, Prowl was offline.

"But he—"

"_He won't survive_," Lockdown roared, servo denting the data-pad with an ugly snap. "You've seen him, Torque! He's jumpy, he's scared as Pit, he's fraggin' _wrecked_—he needs to be able to function like he did 'cos I can't take care of him. I _can't_. I took him on a run last week. He locked up in the middle of a bust, nearly got both him and me off-lined and I can't afford that and neither can he!"

"It's too soon! You can't—you can't tell anything so soon—"

She was pleading now, but it didn't matter. Lockdown had reached the viciousness of truth and it came flooding out of him, even as Prowl shuddered, unwanted and whisper-like, in the background of his center. He hurt, he feared, he felt dirty and guilty and _his fault_ and weak and _it only got worse when Lockdown looked at him_--

"He started doing replay. Somethin' about that place tipped him off and he was screamin' before long, kickin' at everything he could reach. Glitching. I could barely rope him in or get him outta there, and that's nothin' to what organics I was trying to cut down."

He shook his head with difficulty, reliving the pain and disappointment as that one job wrapped up: the stricken look on the kid's face when he came-to, the way he flinched from the servo on his tank and whispered about needing to be alone. He hid from their contractor's commcall as though knowing the alien would demand who the Pit that mech was who nearly cost them the job, and the bastard did.

Then Lockdown nearly lost them the bounty, with the slag he said. But Prowl felt the genuine frustration and fear mixed in with his partner's white-hot protective fierceness and it only hurt the bike further. It seemed Lockdown couldn't do anything right and he couldn't hide what was wrong. They were deadlocked and spiraling, doomed to a twisted existence with only the faintest pretense of hope.

"I know he's hurtin'. I know it, but if there's another thing I know it's that it ain't due for change. I feel it. He's gonna keep doing it and it's gonna kill him little by little. I follow what you say and I'm just gonna watch him off-line," he croaked. "It's gotta go and if I've got a means to make it go, that's it. He's gonna live. M'gonna make him live, whether he wants it or not."

"This will not disappear just because he cannot remember it. It will be hard, knowing," Torque said after an endless silence, nearly monotone. "Your loneliness—everything you went through for him, before and after--will be yours and yours alone."

"Ain't about me, Torque. It's him. Don't care how much it costs," he rasped, even though true cost is never measured in credits—something Torque brought crashing into him.

"You will never be able to Sparkbond. If you do, he will know."

He didn't say anything for a moment, feeling the truth in its echoing entirety—feeling it as he would have before, and as he did in that moment. The old musclecar pried at his spiked neck and felt something still inside of him. The only thing he could offer was the truth.

"Was never the plan."

None of this was in the plan.

Torque finally shook her head—finally accepting, in some small dark measure, the path he was determined to take. She steadied herself as much as she could, with Lockdown crumbling three galaxies away.

"I can't be… I'm in the middle of a job right now. There's another one after that and it will be at least another month before I can get to you, with travel-time. Just… stay with him. Try to talk to him. Just for a month. Is he… recharging?"

"Tryin' to," the mech said faintly, servo skimming near his burdened Spark and the invasive restlessness he felt there—but it was so faint, so hopeless that it didn't qualify as restlessness. It was just Prowl alone on his berth, waiting for him; needing the old mech even as he feared the resentment his intense reliance would incur.

"Alright. It's just a month. Try doing jobs without him. You managed before. Just--I'm begging you, don't make any decisions until I get there. Please."

He didn't acquiesce or refuse her assumption of his need of her, and his silence scared her more than any words could have. She began to shut her datapad down, pausing only at the power switch. Her ancient Spark pulsed painfully, optics focused beyond the screen, somewhere she couldn't quite see for all the memory files choking her replays.

"In the meantime, start… putting out queries."


	53. Sincerest of Betrayals

A/N: So, story announcement! I'm working on another sub-story (about 6 scenes or chapters) concerning Lockdown's trials at Yoketron's dojo, ending with Yoketron's murder. They're going slowly, but considering all the fanfic I'm juggling… HEYYYYYY I'm doin' alright. They're wonderful and jaded and Lockdown's an unforgivable AFT and I love them already!

Sincerest of thanks to the eloquent cat10, EvilKillerPoptarts you sweetie, darling Kaokat and the merciful Dvana, and of course to my beta Christy, who has been most patient and understanding. You guys rawwwwk and if you have any suggestions for later chapters, PLEASE let me know~! I'd be happy to put your visions into fanfic reality if I can make em work :]

* * *

The Sincerest of Betrayals

* * *

The hacker's ship was small, obviously a flip-job. The squat mech (all gunmetal grey with an odd, stooped triangular helm and a crane neck and no legs to speak of) had obviously taken a small, busted cargo ship and reformatted it, if poorly. His twig-arms said his skills did not lie in the physical, a vast comparison when Lockdown strode in with the old femme at his heels, already glaring around the ugly ship with smoldering apprehension.

It was a glitch to find a bounty in proximity to where his ship was stationed (and another small cataclysm to tell Prowl he was going alone), but after three more weeks of fishing, he managed it. He met up with Torque after the hunt and they rode her spiny skimmer to the hacker, waiting nearby as per his request.

It was a risk, certainly, if not to his nerve then to Prowl's strength of processor, but the meeting wasn't just for negotiation. He could do that over the Feed. Even as his pistons nearly locked at the thought, he had to see the mech he was handing his partner to. Nothing else would do.

The hacker's name—designation—was F. It was all that remained of his previous title, whatever that meant, but to have it sent directly into their commlinks in a buzzing text/vocal hybrid was strange. Ducking the thick wires that hung from the patchy ceiling, F swiveled from a cramped-looking control panel with a dully inquisitive whirr-click-click when they approached, tiny colorless optics flashing at them. He was so built-over, exposed color-coordinated ports driven into every surface of his chassis, neither could be sure of his alt-mode: he looked like he was a cramped hover-craft. Once.

[The query intrigued F.]

The mech sent it to them without prompt, puttering around his work-station with its sinister glossy black monitors and scratched-up equipment cluttering the periphery. Not a motion was wasted, save for the strange, compact jitters that jerked at his thick frame every so often. His optics blinked in a way that could be considered neither placid nor alert.

[F has followed Quintesson-operated Cybertronian slavery circuit for approximately 113898322343.227 stellar-cycles. F continually searches for new material. In a continuum of value, memory data rates near to invaluable. If intact and free from traumatic distortion, rare. F would be pleased to assist the two mechs.]

Lockdown was about to growl, stung, about how that didn't sound like anything he mentioned in his query, but Torque interrupted him, blocky servo out as if to stop the methodical flood of information in the confines of her helm.

"Wait. You know about the circuit. You _have_ known—for that long?"

F's optics flickered a centimeter to the left, towards her.

[Affirmative. Cybertronian intel regards slavery ring as conspiracy. Untrue. F would pity the mechs under the Quintessons. F has executed 32 hack-deletion services with similar subject matter. Few escapees, in comparison to number imprisoned. Intriguing.]

"Thirty-two recovered slaves? There are more out there?"

[Probable, if survival rate of—]

"You removed their memory banks, you have the most proof of anyone and you've had it for billions of stellar-cycles! Why didn't you do anything with it? Go to the Elite Guard, _anything_?"

Lockdown should have known better, than to let her come along. She was already in emotional overdrive, looking for any chance to make ruckus and incriminate the 'bot who was looking at them so blankly. Dark and tired as his processor was, he knew her well enough: she thought if she could make them walk out, then he wouldn't do this at all. Should've left her on the ship to mind Prowl, but that would've been suspicious. They had to be so careful of what they did, and even the thought of someone _minding_ his viciously capable, intelligent partner made him grit his—

[Insufficient data,] F responded evenly, unmoved by her mounting disbelief. [Ultimately inconclusive regarding location, management or route. Illogical to seek higher power when risk of F's own exposure increases by over fifty percent.]

"What is this, some sort of cult curiosity to you? It… _intrigues_ you—do you feel no shame?"

Anger and beaten impatience for her melodrama flaring, Lockdown hissed her name and reached for her carpal joint to crunch down and shut her up, but the next text stopped him.

[Affirmative. F feels no shame,] he click-click-clicked, primitive head tilting. [Statement expansion: F feels nothing.]

It was a flat statement, like every other fragment. It wasn't even informative, nor emphasized. It was hard to tell what they wouldn't have jumped at, if just to avoid the fact of why they were there, but Lockdown gestured first, uncertainty evident in his deep rumble.

"What do you mean? You got a Spark, don't you?"

[Correction: Spark provides power-source and base ability. Other steps executed via programming. Deleting software entirely provides no outlet for impulses. Eventually leads 'bot in question to malfunction. Inserting errors into execution software while re-writing said software, however, prevents emotions from manifesting outwardly. Stopcock. Functions acceptably. Resultant tics are only expected from unvarying stream of necessary errors.]

It finally made sense, the way it looked like he was experiencing a short-circuit every so often, mostly in helter-skelter sets of threes. They manifested with an odd, lurching, grinding interruption to F's otherwise silent function. He must have had a separate program to disregard the majority of the errors, otherwise his internal alarms and warnings would have driven him to stall from the constant emotional data a Spark radiated, even if the result did cause lags in his systems. Torque peered at the squat mech as though his very existence made little sense to her.

"You do not feel emotions? At all?"

[Feel is not a technical term. Clarification: F possesses the groundwork for ability classified as EMOTING but is technologically incapable of displaying or experiencing it. Similar to viewing coding and interpreting its intended effect but ceasing motion before a download.]

A long silence followed as Lockdown internalized the meaning of it and Torque rode out yet another slap to her closely-held beliefs.

"May I ask why you did it?" she asked at last, vocals faint.

[Negative. F would find that uncomfortable and mildly offensive.]

His tone and his inflexible words were a clash even ugly colors could not match. It was all executed in the same insect monotone, with that identical 'would' before any subjective feeling. He was aware of what he should be feeling, he simply didn't feel it. F advanced on the two with a bland beep, optics upturned.

[In present, assures two mechs of infinite objectivity when hacking third mech. Query: initiate negotiation?]

Torque flinched slightly next to him, plating clicking restlessly, not just at the fact the deal might be sealed.

"What's the price?" Lockdown asked roughly, trying to ignore the beaten clench of his Spark.

[Clarify: time-period?]

It was the same price for the deletion of one to one hundred stellar-cycles. It chilled any 'bot online to have function put in those cold pixilated terms, in chunks of available space for a fee, no matter what their beliefs, but Lockdown only needed a stellar-cycle or three. The real fee came in the actual hacking. While the 'bot took to calculating, Lockdown interrupted the flurried beeping.

"That and he has some Direct Command software in him. Need you to get that out and replace it with a tracking device." The old musclecar paused—it could almost be qualified as a hesitation, if anyone but him could feel the dizzying waver of his Spark—and his claw drifted instinctively to his mutilated thigh-plating. "And I… uh. Gotta have a merge terminated."

The beeps stopped entirely. F's detailed, almost feminine servos clenched twice, gesture topped with an itchy tic of his blocky optic ridges.

[Complex. Expensive. Connection-empathy-merge-systemsync may be blocked but not terminated. Spark matter, unrelated to F's available skills. State will lessen over time and blockers will nullify when no longer necessary—positive feedback system, 98.3 percent fail-safe. Acceptable?]

"He won't be able to tell?" Lockdown pressed, dentals grit tightly from being forced to talk about Prowl like he was something to be dealt with.

[Discomfort will be present if connection-empathy-merge-systemsync is stressed. Mech will be incapable of tracking source. Blockers are invisible to anything but Beta-level scan.]

F stopped almost expectantly. When it became clear that Lockdown was looking for more, his diminutive helm drifted out and tilted, unintentionally quizzical in appearance.

[Has been described as 'twinge'. Sensation: insubstantial. Conclusion: most advantageous course.]

The price was huge.

Never had Lockdown thought about paying so much for a blank spot. It would gut the rest of his account and the kid's. Leave them hanging in the middle of a cold sector with practically nothing. He felt Torque tense beside him as the demanded numbers sprawled into an eight-digit burden in their respective helms. She knew his account numbers as well as he did, nearly. When the silence stretched too long (as did her hope that they were walking out), she stepped forward as though to implore the gunmetal mech.

"You want… to satisfy your own curiosity, don't you? See more proof of the circuit," the old femme began, still trying to hide the reluctance and revulsion in her vocals even if F wasn't capable of feeling offense. "Can't you lower the price for that?"

Blue optics flashed three times. They could almost feel the numbers line up.

[Price is directly equivocal to the amount of effort F spends in profession,] he buzzed blankly. [F cannot nullify this equation for any emotional appeal or curiosity. It is logical. If mechs wish for the highest level of attention and professionalism with their third mech, mechs must pay the featured price. Imperative.]

Finally, tattooed head bowed low, Lockdown nodded.

"I'll pay it," he muttered. Then, feeling and seeing Prowl shuddering against the berth's edge as he rode out another ghost pain a planet away, his mismatched servos curled into fists. "Pay whatever it takes, if it'll get him runnin' right."

* * *

There were no introductions. They walked in together two solar-cycles later, the two of them; it was just Prowl, Lockdown at his back, and an unknown 'programmer' waiting beside his murmuring terminal—the one who would remove the Direct Command software from him, he was texted succinctly with that unnervingly steady buzz. The bike hesitated, tensing as though the scuffed walls of the carrier were closing in, and the electrical storm of anxiety inside Lockdown's chamber was nearly impossible to mask.

"You gotta do it."

"I realize it is… logical, but…"

His vocals were faint with disuse, uncommonly reedy. He'd hardly spoken for the two-some months they had survived together; he was losing his grip, dissolving into something hunted and constantly shaken as the real world failed to offer solace enough to keep him from regressing into his past experiences. Lockdown put a servo on Prowl's shoulder-plating, gripping him roughly as if to keep his trembling partner on the ground and in one piece.

"If that brat shows up again, one word and you'll be at his pedes. You want that?"

He tried to keep himself gruff and dominant, incapable of being questioned--anything to disguise how desperate he was to get the younger mech down onto the table and into hard stasis without Prowl realizing there was anything strange about the equipment or the mech waiting motionless in the corner, watching their exchange without expression. Never had the old musclecar been required to manufacture grinding honesty or detachment before, and his innards nearly locked under the alien stress of it.

"You gotta get that stuff out."

Prowl did not respond, optics focused on a far-off corner.

It wasn't as though he did not fear the software anymore. He still wanted to remove it, remembering all too well what it had caused him to do to his partner. His will-power was one of the most precious things he claimed. Still, he looked at the unknown mech with a forcefully blank expression, because still the fear remained. It was the deeper fear, the one of letting anyone into his inside workings; of being trapped in the dark, helpless to stop anyone from slaughtering his existence with a well-written program and a burst of electricity.

If he needed someone's intentions to fear, he was looking at the wrong mech.

"Lockdown," he barely managed, a shudder quaking up from his core. In the name was a plethora of levels of despair and shame, first and foremost a plea to leave the dark, grubby ship, because it was too soon to have his insides ripped out again or be touched by anyone he did not know or to _trust_ again, but Lockdown grabbed his arm, pulling them chassis-to-chassis.

"If you're gonna do it for anyone, do it for me," he rumbled tensely, tripping on the words and the unwieldy sentiment.

He forced himself to relax his mechanics, and the effect spread in a clicking wave from his spiny plating. His engine gave a reassuring growl when Prowl reluctantly pressed his helm to his partner's chamber plating. For the first time, Lockdown actually used their connection to send a nudge-pulse of goodwill and razor-edged strength (andjustbarelytheredesperation), making the little bike flinch and his intakes catch. Reminding him of what he was going to reboot to, same as always.

"You're gonna be fine, kid. Do it. I'll watch to make sure nothin' happens."

He finally went down.

The wire-clotted headpiece only drew a flicker of the bike's hidden optics as he lay down on the cold table, but once the squat gunmetal mech had connected a line to his audio port and the downer code started to stream like iron slag into every tender sensor, blotting out function as he knew it, Prowl jerked up out of disintegrating consciousness and gripped Lockdown's forearm. Visor angling desperately, fixed on Lockdown's own facial plating, he whispered:

"I trust you."

Lockdown wasn't sure whether it was a plea, a warning or just a fragment before defenseless darkness. The kid was gone the next klik, with a mechanical moan and a dwindling of his fearful aqua luminescence. Lockdown carefully pried the cream digits away from his plating, something in him crunching into nothing as the arm fell back down beside Prowl with a flat clang, nothing left but a shell.

"He's out?"

[Artificial stasis-lock 89 percent engaged,] the hacker reported as he moved to hook Prowl into the tangle of wires looming above him. The bike's glossy black helm disengaged into several shell levels with muted clicks and hisses as F plugged him into at least twenty lines with a swift machine-gun efficiency before returning to his console and plugging himself in to three times that. The squat 'bot shuddered, ticking madly, then went utterly still.

There was silence, at least half a megacycle of it. During that time, Torque arrived, optics immediately paling and jerking away upon seeing Prowl laid out and hooked up. There wasn't a reason for it. She just couldn't stay away and Lockdown didn't care enough to bar her from it. Lockdown allowed her servo to trace the back of his stooped helm while they waited, wiling away the cycles by the most ancient distraction in existence until their commlinks were invaded again.

[Interruption: difficulty.]

Lockdown looked up, red optics reduced to a guttering maroon. F might as well have been a cold shell or a pile of scrap—he was capable of only transmissions but no movement, other than the itchy hum of his core.

[Firewalls are too high for safe entrance and access to memory banks.]

He should have known, but that didn't stop Lockdown from rising to his pedes and cursing. Prowl was terrified. It was an unconscious response, he probably wasn't even trying to double his defenses but--

[F is capable of penetrating firewalls, but it will cause undue stress on mech. May result negatively, impair processor function. Suggestion: induce void.]

"You need me to get him to void," Lockdown repeated slowly, after the curt message had sunk in. "T'get into his banks."

[If possible, affirmative.]

Voiding was an extreme form processor stalling, as a result of shock. Once a system, preferably the emotional system, underwent an overwhelming stress, a horizon point existed where all defenses dropped due to complete absorption in higher processes, such as cognition. The firewalls usually doubled after that, but F was capable of catching it. He assured them of it—or simply stated it, but it didn't matter, because the musclecar still had to take the hacker at his word.

Lockdown searched his banks, but there was only one option: there had only been one option. He turned away from the hacker and toward Prowl, optics running up and down the bike's unarmored, supine form, the shape of his servos and the line of his oral components. As a creature absorbing, for the last time, something that he was about to lose, Lockdown took Prowl in.

"He won't remember it. What I say."

[Affirmative.]

"You can swear to that," he insisted viciously, motor braying tense and short.

[In accordance to the chronological order of the deletion, mech's words will be the first memory to vanish,] F responded with aggravating evenness.

Finally, Lockdown nodded darkly then went to his partner, going down on his knee-plating beside the table. The hacker gave the signal and Prowl came out of it with a jitter of his limbs, flickering back to function.

"Hey. Prowl." His servo drifted out of its own accord (as if to _hold on to him_) and Lockdown tapped at his fragmented helm, repeating his name softly as he was able. "Prowl."

"Is it—done?" he said weakly, already trying to get off the berth before his systems had even begun to sync. Lockdown pressed him back with horrible ease and a shallow clank.

"Naw, kid. Brought you back to ask you somethin', then you gotta go back into stasis"

Prowl looked up at him in unbearable confusion, unaware even of the wires pouring from his helm—looking not to his scrambled read-outs, but to the other mech for protection and guidance. He stopped trying to get off the berth: his only effort was directed toward keeping his optics locked with his partner's. Lockdown stifled whatever was about to split his chamber in half and pushed on, his servo sliding to the kid's chassis, rubbing.

"You remember… your old master? Yoketron, right?"

Prowl nodded haltingly: the movement decayed halfway through as he started to drift off again, faculties scattering.

"Stay with me, kid, c'mon," the old mech hissed, digits tightening across his chamber-plating. "Yoketron. The old rust-bucket with the helmet like yours; thought that peace was the right of all sentient beings. What happened to him?"

"He… is offline. Was… murdered by a…" His elegant facial plating contracted with the effort of listening, then trying to synthesize the steps of listening, comprehending and then aligning his blurry vocal functions. "How do you know his—his name?"

"I know it 'cos I trained under him a long time ago," Lockdown rumbled into his partner's dislocated audio, digits suddenly stilling on the bike's chest plating. "That and I was the one that killed him."

Prowl's visor snapped wide, everything inside of his chassis lurching and tightening with a frenzied rise of beeping, then froze as though someone had jammed a rod into his gears with an unheard but seismic crack. Everything was preserved, from the arch of his lithe body to the sharp interrupted claw of his digits. Most lurid was his expression: deep horror in a perfect state of defenselessness, only gained through his intense care for an old mech who had shaped his function. Yoketron meant so much to him he couldn't even begin to protest his partner's innocence—and Lockdown never lied. Even in such a state, Prowl knew that.

The silence that followed was some of the deepest of Lockdown's function.

[Void executed. Firewalls reduced to 32%. Entry now secure. F will initiate deletion and blocker installation.]

The old musclecar brushed a servo over his partner's anguished facial plating. He stood up with a weak grind of his mechanics, unable to do much more than turn his back to the bike that he'd been entangled with longer than he'd ever known, even as he feared the final crush of the same senseless forces that had smashed them together without care or meaning.

[Delete one stellar cycle to date?]

"No. Delete… two stellar-cycles and fifty-six solar-cycles." Lockdodwn said stiffly, searching his banks.

That would put them on Tellum. Random job. He needed an indiscriminate point in time: their cover story wouldn't work otherwise. He was almost thankful that the memory of baring their Sparks to one another hadn't been included in the initial download. He'd be too tempted to include it, otherwise, and that was risky. Too close to the real thing. He wouldn't be able to pull it off—and if the rest of their function was going to be a lie, it had to be one he could keep up.

He moved back to the wall where Torque was waiting, looking intensely worried and uncertain as to whether or not she should touch him; he looked as if he would disintegrate into his horribly insubstantial components at the slightest knock to his plating. He wouldn't meet her optics. She asked him what he said to cause Prowl to void.

"Told him I loved him," he said, and moved past her to sit down with a wounded groan of gears, helm in his stolen servos.

To him, the two facts were the same: unspeakable, for fear of what he would lose if they were said aloud.

He was on the floor for little more than a few cycles before the hack actually began. The first flicker of pain that went through him nearly made him growl aloud. The second nearly made him void. Even as Prowl was silent and motionless on the table, his Spark warped into a mauled seed of light at the brutal, hateful invasion of his inner workings. He cried Lockdown to him, pulling the other half of his connection to him through sheer force of blind, pulsing pain and vibrating fear.

The proximity was a death-knell. The old mech couldn't feel much and then he couldn't think much, then before he knew it he was up on his pedes and reaching for his partner, jolted back into cold-coded cognition only by Torque's sharp insufficient grip on his hip-wheels and the sudden script blinking in his head. It shot from the motionless bot like insect lightning with a violence communicated only by urgency and the intense frequency it was relayed on.

[MECH WILL NOT TOUCH. MECH WILL NOT TOUCH. MECH WILL NOT TOUCH.]

Before he knew what was happening, a sliding door was slamming shut and Torque was pushing him onto a bench in what could only be a store-room. He hit like a pile of spare parts, disembodied parts of him jangling and clanking. His optics trailed her hazily as she dug around in shelves and boxes until she found what she wanted, then clanked down onto her knees with an armful of dirty tools. When Lockdown realized what the cans were—some bonding material, a spatula and a can of plating polish—he started to rise upright again, furious at the triviality when Prowl _needed him_ on the other side of the door, but she rose to counter him, grabbed his arm and crunched down as hard as she could.

"You've clawed yourself to pieces for over a stellar-cycle. Observant as he is, do you think Prowl will miss what's left of your thigh-plating?"

It had been months since he had thought about himself. Longer still since he had looked at himself. Lockdown hadn't realized that all the steady, anxious self-mutilation he'd done over the stellar-cycle had worked his plating down to a mauled length of metal with barely a scrap of paint on it.

"He'll know something is wrong and you already have enough to cover up. So sit down and let me do this." He made a sound, low and vicious, but Torque's vocals were steel. "Please, Lockdown."

Because she couldn't say what she wanted to, she texted it in a wrenching rush of information.

_We need a distraction, or else you'll snap and touch him. Grab him. I know how you feel, and I can't stand to be in there either. It reminds me of Beta and I might grab him myself. So sit down, for the love of Primus, and l_et me do this_._

That was the green mech's name. Beta.

Caught in that sudden realization, intense only through their shared memory, Lockdown didn't fight as she pushed him down onto the bench again and opened the can of bonding material. She began to repair him, motions quickly turning rote as the spatula smeared and shaped the metal magma over his half-exposed neural net. Lockdown gave up, sagging against the wall of the dark room, processor phasing in and out in time with Prowl's terrified pulses. There was only a door and one femme between him and the mech he knew he couldn't function without.

His Spark strained at the edges of his chamber, glowing out towards Prowl in a permanent ache. After so long, he just wanted to be near the bike. That's all he wanted, and it still seemed like too much after what he'd done; all that he'd stolen from his partner, just to prove he didn't need the old mech who wanted him to doubt himself.

"Never let him go," Torque said suddenly, scraping at the thick substance with a trembling intensity, optics locked on the ugly metal in front of her. "You've seen the other side. You know how it is to be without him: never let him wonder how you really feel."

His old Spark throbbed hard, his name almost materializing from the wrenching blast of panic from the 'bot on the table as his memory banks were finally breached.


	54. Assumptions

A/N: You might want to read 'First Impressions' to get a little sneak-peek at the history between Torque and Swindle, or you can just look at their personalities and KNOW that they hate each other by default :D

OH GOD THE ANGST IS OVER EVERYBODY DO THE MONKEY-DANCE. Thank you all for being so patient with me. Seriously. You know what's stupid? When I started the Anicon-Memory-Wankery arc, I seriously thought it was going to be, like, five chapters.

HAAAAAAAAAH.

Thanks for sticking with me, guys. Love you.

* * *

Assumptions

* * *

They were back on the tiny red and black ship, F's own carrier long out of range. Lockdown was settled in his quarters with Prowl's limp shell, simply holding the little bike in the way he needed to until Prowl could reboot to a well-constructed falsehood.

Torque had already updated the other bike's data-pad and cleared the history, then rearranged his room in small, strange ways, nicking his shuriken slightly and ruffling his eternal tree, planting sourceless hints of Prowl's supposedly continued existence. Together, the mech and the femme arranged life as it should have been, albeit with the singular weakness of the bounty hunters' gutted accounts.

_"We'll build it up again. We'll do it so fast it'll make your gyros spin."_

_Then, quieter, to himself—dislocated from credits because he didn't seem to be talking about money anymore, but something deeper to make up for the loss of glowing blue and red almost touching._

_"We'll build it up."_

To top it off, the two barely had enough energon left to fuel themselves, much less the ship. They were at poverty level, stranded in a relatively primitive sector, and they had not come all this way to fall to something so simple. Lockdown had given up too much for that, but there was one thing he couldn't do for himself. That's what she was there for.

"Lockdown, _old_ _buddy_? Is that—"

Even as it made her tanks churn, that's what she was there for.

The main comm-screen flashed on, the brightly lit ship on the other side of the line nearly blocked out by the bulky mech leaning so close to the lens that his olfactory sensor nearly touched the glass. Upon sight of the small femme, however, he froze down to his gears, then fell back into his seat with a dull slam.

"Oh. It's…_you_," Swindle grimaced, purple optics narrowing to unabashed slits. It was a level of ugly, candid dislike few had ever seen before—to match, Torque's optics were already malignant shards.

"Yes, it is. I would say it's a pleasure to see you, but I wouldn't want to waste your time."

"Heh, isn't that _clever_. I bet you worked for a _millennia_ or two on that one, did you? Only _expected_, running on sixteen bytes…" Swindle muttered to himself as he nicked at his facial plating, then flashed the three-wheeler a shining grin that was nothing but a modified snarl. "Did you call for a reason, _sir_? Because I'm a busy mech and chatting with obsolete models isn't exactly on my _to-do_ catalog."

"We found Prowl."

"Really? Well isn't that just _swell_?" the arms-dealer exclaimed, leaning back and hoisting his massive pedes up on his terminal. He gestured breezily, optics elsewhere. "Glad to hear everything's back to rights. Tell him to call me if he needs a gun or two, sounds like he needs to step up on his personal protection—"

"How long did you know?" she demanded, vocals reduced to a vicious whisper. "I just want to know."

"That's classified," he said and snapped his digits, using that plastic voice that nonetheless had a creak to it: that of plastic slapped or stung. Torque's dentals clacked together.

"So that's all the responsibility you're going to take."

"My only responsibility is for my merchandise, little biddy. Anything else is clearly not featured in the contract, and anything off the contract isn't my problem."

"You could have told Lockdown anytime. You could have _saved him_."

Evidently it hadn't all been as thoughtless a move for the arms-dealer as Torque assumed: Swindle suddenly straightened like he'd had a wire yanked, pedes hitting the floor with a boom, optics alight.

"_I_ could have saved him—and at what cost? Do you know even _know_ what kind of client confidentiality I broke to even give the old 'bot that? It was practically self-detonation, what I did for him, and you all seem to be forgetting: I didn't steal that damned Autobot! That doesn't--I didn't do a thing! I didn't do _anything_, I just _did—my--job_," he snarled, slamming his servo down on his terminal.

"You're quite right, Swindle. You didn't do a thing," Torque said after a moment, facial plating almost blank. "You could have helped him, but you didn't."

Swindle simply fumed, hating the high and holy femme and her crucifying optics with all of his being, and tucked his stinging servo back out of sight: his left servo, patched sloppily with crinkled iron plates from where a potential client had slammed his oil-can down so hard it severed the neural network, just to say he wasn't interested. Especially with Megatron out of commission, the income hole Lockdown left couldn't be easily filled. The arms-dealer had been reduced to… trolling.

The state of his servo explained well enough how it was going.

"There actually is a reason I called, despite my obvious high regard for you and your warm Spark," the femme continued coldly. "Lockdown is down to his last credit. He needs energon."

"I don't remember a time when old LD couldn't speak for himself," Swindle grit out, baring his dentals in another poisonous chrome grin. A new energy sizzled in him at the mention of his old business partner—an energy that would not go to waste in chasing the old antique away. "I haven't seen the big guy in too long! Be a good little drone and get him on the line for me, and we can discuss it."

"He asked me not to call you. Specifically."

Functionally, it was truth.

There was a long, long, long pause between the two 'bots, growing longer still as Swindle reached to rub at his facial plating and realized how very, very deep this hurt was. But part of him still didn't understand, because they got the damn bike back, didn't they? They were back to the status quo, their connection commercially viable once more, and he had even _helped_—but he grasped at something not forthcoming to his compartmentalized processor.

Mainly, the reason callous, objective, _professional_ Lockdown went to such lengths to avoid speaking with him.

"I have a milli-case in the back," Swindle muttered at length. His vocals were strangely hazy, like he didn't quite know what he was doing.

"A kilo-case." She glared stonily at him when the young arms-dealer looked up at her, optics startled wide. "I know you have it."

"Fine, a kilo-case," he snapped, turning and bending to manipulate screens and keys at his control station. "I'll… subspace it."

She waited for him to set it up, then frigidly exchanged coordinates with him. Once the glowing stack of fuel popped into existence, tied by wiring and landing with a rattling boom on Moot's scuffed floor, the arms-dealer suddenly stilled, hunching slightly. Optics abnormally dim, Swindle laced his digits together nervously and murmured into them:

"Tell him it's from me."

Torque looked him for a klik, as though summing up his very existence with the image before her, then shut down the comm-link.

"No."

* * *

It was time.

Half a megacycle before Prowl's scheduled reboot, Lockdown laid him out on his own berth, servos at his sides, and replaced each gold-lined piece of his partner with steady servos. All of the grey-brown filth from the dark hall was gone, wiped away months ago by those same servos. The exotic armor fleshed the bike out, mod by shining mod, into the 'bot Lockdown had fought for. Hunched by the berth-side, he waited.

It happened at the exact nanoklik the hacker had promised. Lockdown's old Spark nearly knotted at the rising hum of a reboot: the electric tide brought his tiny partner back to life with a tiny spasm and a flicker of aqua. Prowl stared at the low ceiling, refreshing his hidden optics blearily, then took a shuddering intake and looked over at the mech he would have never forgiven, had he known.

There was still the most terrifying of chances that the look would be blank, too blank, and speak of some irreversible butchering of his vital programming—but the small blipping noises the bike emitted, hue of his visor, the thin line of his mouth… all of it was intelligent, textured, and somehow beautifully naïve. Unhurt. Untouched.

It had worked.

"Lockdown?"

Hardly believing who was in front of him, in all his parts and pieces, (that dark year seemed to condense and hide somewhere in his piping, evil and cold) Lockdown refreshed his vocals.

"You okay, kid?"

"What… happened?" Prowl asked softly, sitting up. The heavy motion seemed to jumpstart his finer processes, sending a waterfall of information into his buzzy processor. He winced as all the pieces came rushing back and didn't quite fit: data, chronometers… it didn't match, even if it was a relatively small gap. Just to check (just to touch), Lockdown reached out and took hold of his glossy black and gold helm, scanning his visor and his audios for any 'damage'.

"You got caught in an EMP blast from some dumb fragger when we were fighting—he snagged my piece and overloaded it. Looked pretty huge," he muttered. "What's the last thing you remember?"

"I… I remember…" Prowl shook his head, visor denting delicately. "It's quite unclear, but I remember being on Tellum."

"Primus. You got… 'bout two stellar-cycles knocked out of you."

His tone was gruff, as though the bike was lucky it wasn't more. Prowl's expression alone—tight and distraught—said he wasn't of the same opinion.

"Two stellar-cycles?" he demanded, servo immediately going to his chassis, as though feeling for the tear in his snow-white memory core. Two stellar-cycles. Three-hundred and sixty-five solar-cycles. Eight-thousand seven-hundred and sixty megacycles. Gone. His processor raced, defining the gap and trying to close it. "Is there… any way to regain the data? File-recovery? It cannot be gone. We must have it backed up on Moot--"

"You're as updated as can be, kid. You'll just have to deal."

"Did anything of importance happen?" Prowl asked mildly after a long, long pause. He was grounded by Lockdown's hard vocals (and his partner's flinty expectations) despite the deep, sincere flinch of regret at losing a part of himself. But, he tried to tell himself, it was only a stellar-cycle or two. Less than a hundredth of his current life-span; a thousandth of all that was to come.

Logic didn't stop the sadness. Some of his function, so much more than binary recordings and stored impulses, was lost to the dark space void as if it—as if _he_—had never existed in the first place.

"Nothin' we can't do again," Lockdown rasped with a strangely tight smirk, patting the bike's thigh-plating. Prowl did the Prowl-equivalent of rolling his optics—a disapproving and singularly pompous twist of his mouth--then looked beyond Lockdown, where Torque was waiting by the wall, far enough away to be called respectful. Her expression was soft and sad for the spiritual loss she had just seen him cope with—one she understood all too well. At the sight of her, however, his long face suddenly went slack, then stiffened up.

"Hello, darling," she said gently.

"You lied."

"Wh—ah, what?"

The tense tone in his vocals, still slightly reedy, made both the older bounty hunters' substructures tighten fiercely. All optics in the room fixed on him, onlookers already fearing the worst in their ragged Sparks, Prowl raised a servo and pointed at the old femme.

"Something did happen. Something tragic. Torque," he said with lethal slowness, visor wide. "What were you thinking?"

It was like he had struck her. She froze, staring down, first at her pedes, then at her blank chassis—did she forget something, _what did she forget that had given it all away_—aching from the width and breadth of her disorientation and what was at stake. Then she realized she had forgotten something: the hideous bars of pink, blue and white marring her magenta plating. This was technically the first time he'd seen the racing stripes.

It hit her so hard she had to bend over, laughing so hard she nearly stalled.

"I'm not quite sure myself. Lethal lapse of judgment in my old age," she chuckled tearfully, then stepped forward and hugged the little bike to her chest-plating, hardly resisting the urge to kiss his audio unit. "I'm so glad you're okay."

"It is pleasant to return, even if you are not aware of where you have been," Prowl offered sagely, smiling at Lockdown over her shoulder-plating—optics only for his partner. Once the old femme disentangled herself, Prowl straightened and turned to Lockdown, expression incredibly un-concerned.

"So… everything else is fine?"

"Not everythin'," Lockdown said heavily, beastly head bowing slightly as though ducking an unpleasant truth. Torque immediately put up her blocky servos, chuckling weakly and edging towards the airlock. She took off with little more than a wave and good-wishes, saying only that she would leave the two hunters to discuss their financial issues by their lonesome. They saw her to the bridge, Lockdown moving alarmingly slow. She was out the airlock after promising to drop the two a line, leaving the bike and his partner alone in the bridge.

"Well?"

Lockdown bought himself time by stomping heavily to his navigator's chair and easing his broken body into it. He was obviously picking his words carefully, and that alone made Prowl's visor dent.

"We, uh… ain't so well-off."

"That sounds like a euphemism," Prowl said warily.

"A what?" Lockdown growled, then didn't wait for an answer, settling instead for a blunt, painful, "We got about a grand left."

"In your account?"

"Between us."

"_What_?" Prowl exclaimed, visor flashing in shock. "Just… one-thousand credits?"

"We got enough to pay our way to the next job. We'll move from there." Lockdown said, as though focusing on said job would keep him from brooding over their empty accounts. When Prowl spoke again, his vocals were faint.

"What… happened?"

"Bad investment. Finally went in with one'a Swindle's bigger schemes. I was low. Y'loaned me all'a what you had. Bastard stole it and took off." Lockdown shook his head wearily, then finished darkly, "F'I could get my hook into that mech, he'd beg to be deactivated."

Prowl's optics widened. He had never trusted the hummer, for all of his apparent goodwill towards Lockdown. Indeed, this seemed like the foul move the bike had been expecting for decades, but he had never expected his shrewd partner to make it so _easy_ for the slimy arms-dealer, nor on such a huge scale.

"But… all of it? That was decades worth of savings," Prowl began weakly, more baffled than upset. He was pricked at the idea of all that money disappearing, for the simple waste of it, but the fact remained that he had never cared much for money. It just didn't feel right. It seemed… out-of-character for Lockdown to actually borrow a sum from him. Prowl shook his helm, searching for the right questions to ask.

"What sort of pay-off could possibly justify an investment so rash? Furthermore, how could you have believed—"

"I'll pay you back. Y'know I'm good for it."

Prowl opened his mouth again, and, knowing anger was his best defense, Lockdown raised his mutilated vocals and slammed his fist on his arm-rest, glaring at the wall.

"Cork your fraggin' vocalizer, I don't need t'be told what I did! I'll fix it, damnit!"

Unnoticed amongst the gnarled clench of his innards, his engine roared right along with him, unfortunately producing a wholly unnerving and tinny rattle.

Prowl froze next to him, audio units suddenly fully alert, then stepped forward and forcibly shoved the musclecar's mammoth chair around, both it and his partner squeaking tensely at the hinges when Lockdown raised his servos--almost as though fending off a blow from a very enraged partner who wasn't going to take his excuses as to why his bank account was empty. Prowl knocked his arms aside and pressed both servos to the musclecar's chamber plating, then groped lower, elegant helm cocked to the side in a hard concentration. When he looked up into Lockdown's angry and baffled facial plating, his visor was a dangerous shade of teal.

"What was that?" he asked icily. Lockdown nearly sputtered, caught between shoving the smaller mech away and taking advantage of what looked like a change of subject.

"What's what?"

"That rattle." When Lockdown growled instinctively, his insides joined in, making Prowl's visor widen with a stunned and offended blip. "Sweet Spark, what have you _done_ to yourself?"

Lockdown realized he was talking about the uncomfortable clanks and grinding noises coming from his chassis. They had been around for months, so long that he'd learned to put up with them and the squeezed, ugly aching they caused him. There were bigger things to worry about, like Prowl. Not liking this change of pace, even if it did offer him an escape from lying, the bounty hunter figured he'd get the whole thing done with right there, while Prowl was pissed.

"We're talkin' money, right now," he growled doggedly. "You can—"

"And in accordance to your stupidity, our financial situation is not one that can be resolved quickly," Prowl cut him off with steely vocals, searching out one last section of his crusty chest-plating before turning on his gold-rimmed heel and stalking from the bridge, gait furious. "It can wait. The state of your mechanics, should you be opposed to the idea of going into severe mechanical arrest in the next few megacycles, cannot. You will be in my quarters in twenty cycles."

"But—"

"Twenty cycles or I claim every credit we earn until your debt to me is paid."

The older mech was denied the last word again, this time by the standoffish snap of a sliding door. He waited a moment before bowing slightly and pressing his black-marked face into his servo. Somehow, he knew Prowl wouldn't bring up the issue of the loan again. So long as they had energon to fuel themselves and travel to the location of their next assignment, he was content.

Somehow, that made him feel more ill than relieved.

* * *

Twenty cycles later, as per the ninja's orders, he was flat on the damnably narrow berth with Prowl perched atop him.

It would have been a temptation the old musclecar couldn't resist, if he wasn't distracted by the healing havoc the tiny mech was wreaking on him: Prowl was deep in abusing him with rattling, vengeful circuit-su vibrations that made things snap and pop back into place far more violently than Lockdown ever remembered. If that wasn't bad enough, Prowl also alternated between lecturing him about taking care of his already destroyed body and frigid silences intended to punish the larger mech, slapping his big servos away whenever Lockdown attempted to touch the small, genuinely pissed-off bike, even if it was to shift Prowl off of a plate he just realized was quite askew and sore.

More often than once, long face crumpled with edgy concern, the ninjabot murmured to himself _how he had_ _let this happen_ over that two-stellar-cycle gap as he probed all over his partner's creaking piecemeal body, attuning himself to the myriad of fractures and dislocations plaguing Lockdown's complex insides.

Lockdown told him they'd been busy. There had been no time for this stuff. Prowl took the excuse with something close to a sneer, silently dumping all of the ill-maintenance blame on Lockdown and his stubborn nature, and readjusted the other mech's socket pins violently enough to make Lockdown dig his digits into the berth.

"Ow! Y'little glitch!"

"Do you wish to detach your primary modifications and your servos before I begin on your abdominal cavity? Simply to make your outside mirror your inside, of course."

"Shut up."

Feeling more than a little sick, the bounty hunter sat back and let him do it, unaware until that moment of the crunching disservice he had done to his mechanics over the last stellar-cycle. Combining the absence of Prowl's regular circuit-su alignments with the way he'd neglected himself when searching for his partner… It made for a Pit of a readjustment. He winced and hissed where appropriate and only jerked upwards when Prowl bent and popped his main hood, peering into his dark insides. Lockdown growled and snapped his top down so fast it almost caught his partner's servos.

"Get your digits outta there!"

"I was simply checking if you still had pins in your engine," Prowl said as nastily as he could, then got back to work. He was not the type to let his petty yet satisfying revenge get in the way of his work, unlike Lockdown. He could multi-task.

Within half a megacycle, most of the hard stuff was done; the process softened into warm, fleshy vibrations that always put the large mech into hard stasis, washing up and down his sore frame in alignment with Prowl's silky servos. But once the pain was gone, there was nothing to distract him from the bike atop him, still all solemn ninja-business as he finished up the delicate processes, and that was a problem for a mech who had to pretend that he hadn't just regained the most precious thing in his function.

Processor fuzzy, Lockdown's big servos snuck up Prowl's slender legs; the bike knocked them away with a stern look. He hadn't so much as assumed the proper position again before his partner was sliding his servos along the sides of his pedes, grip both clumsy and intense. He propped Prowl closer to him, until he was nearly perched on his chamber plating, and the bike's visor narrowed, tiny engine giving a disapproving whine.

"I cannot complete the readjustment if you insist on mech-handling me, Lockdown," he said testily, using the other's name as a rare weapon. "And I am not at all averse to exiting this moment and letting you experience the effects of a half-completed alignment, which I promise is _quite_ unpleasant."

"Cool your jets, kid," Lockdown growled blurrily, head lolling back. "M'just…"

There was something witty to say, but Lockdown couldn't manage it. Prowl was above him, Spark strong in his chamber, whole and healed; the mere weight of him, complex and safe, was enough to make Lockdown's center sore for more of him. The old mech refreshed his vocals and simply continued touching his partner's cream plating in an absorbed manner, almost piteous in its intensity, which didn't escape Prowl's notice any more than the sudden change in tone did. The little bike's visor dented cautiously, anger subdued.

"Lockdown," he said quietly, catching the other's attention far too quickly—even if it was just a flicker of his optics, it wasn't normal. The vibrations had loosened the bounty hunter's common sense and his imperative need to maintain the charade. The sound of his own name, in those cool vocals, was still too sweet to the old mech. "Did something happen?"

"When?" he asked dully, then shook his head like he realized what the other mech meant. He had at least that much wit about him. "No."

"You're certain?"

"Few things," Lockdown murmured after a long pause.

"Such as?"

Prowl's servos were on his chest-plating, but they weren't moving. The subsonic hum had retreated into a sleepy undercurrent: he wasn't going to continue until he was given an explanation. Lockdown let out a deep rumble that hid his hesitation, then forced himself to say it steadily and offhandedly, dull as possible. Like everything was fine.

"We were on a planet. Some… jungle scrap heap."

"Mission?"

"Pleasure. You… wanted t'go."

"And you accompanied me?" Prowl arched a ridge, his visor lighting his thin smile velvet teal in the half-dark room. "I cannot imagine how I convinced you to."

Lockdown nodded. He remembered the comm-call argument, so flinty and natural, unknowing of what would rip them apart. The annoyance—the well-learned stubbornness, the perfect counterweight--in Prowl's far-away vocals now seemed like something to treasure.

"We were there for a few megacycles. Messin' around. Then these… fraggers came out and tried to take off with you."

"Take me?"

Naïve and light—that was the way he asked it, sharp visor quirking in confusion, because he'd never been strapped to a table until blood-red rust spread over his carpal joints, scream long-faded into a hiss of static.

"Pit if I know. Just… had a go at you. Had an EMP generator. Guess they caught you at a corner or somethin'." He refreshed his vocals, something crunching inside of his echoing chassis. "Y'called for me."

"It must have been serious, if I called," Prowl said uncertainly after a long moment. "What happened?"

"Scrapped em. Scrapped 'em all."

His vocals were nothing but a croak, like that of a chainsaw ripping through plating.

"And then?" Prowl asked softly, stilled on a mechanical level by the words and the tone and the tension he felt underneath him. Lockdown shook his head.

"Nothin'. We got back on the ship and just… kept on goin'."

"Lockdown?" he whispered.

There was no answer, verbal or physical. A prickly foreboding rose in his petite chassis at the untold emotions radiating from the motionless mech's center. His cream digits knit over Lockdown's chamber. He wanted desperately to share his anguish or simply to _know_ what was twisting his beastly face, concern only outpaced by his confusion. Then suddenly, Lockdown woke.

"There's your story. Like I said, you didn't miss much. Everythin's fine. Now quit askin' questions and get on with it, I'm gettin' a kink in my struts from your damn berth."

He pushed the bike's tender servos off of his front, then turned his white head to the side, mechanics settling with a wheeze, and stayed there. After a second of hesitation, Prowl complied wordlessly.

Another round of soothing vibrations and the old mech was dead weight on the undersized berth, offline optics darker than Prowl had ever remembered. The decision to join him in recharge was an easy one: Prowl felt oddly exhausted after his awakening and the readjustment, and, even more oddly, in need of physical touch. Besides that, Lockdown's servos had locked around his waist before he lost power, black-marked facial-plating slack, dented with a combination of extreme sadness and a relief too haggard to offer solace.

Struck by the expression, Prowl simply _looked_ as he had neglected to do for decades, no longer taking the other's fearsome but solid appearance for granted. Combined with the new scuffs on his loosely-held plating, the bounty-hunter looked so very…old. Old as one could never be when he had nothing in function to treasure and protect--and old as he could only be when he realized just how empty that function was without the mech he loved above all else.

An unspeakable unrest settling in his chassis, as though something deep had been disturbed within him, Prowl curled next to his partner and began to shut down with a quiet electronic tone. Lockdown was hard and heavy, Spark sizzling softly—comforting as nothing else could be. No matter what he lost or gained in the process of his function, Prowl's world was here.

The little bike pressed himself underneath the big mech's arm, visual feed losing resolution, and barely felt his Spark flicker towards the older mech's in a sudden, near-desperate twinge before he slipped away.


	55. Waste

A/N: They're ba~ack!

* * *

Waste

* * *

It was an odd paradox, slumming it with the same 'bots he could be paid to hunt down.

After so long on the bounty-hunting circuit, and longer yet seeking distraction with energon, Lockdown's spiky presence was an accepted threat at any scummy bar. It seemed any sane criminal would abandon ship, but the old musclecar wasn't a danger—and was honestly a funny as Pit mech—unless it was your name on the yellow slip. Then a bot had better burn rubber, because it was against Lockdown's religion to turn down money and he was truly, pristinely neutral.

Technically, however, it wouldn't decrease or increase their chances of being caught if they were at the same bar, as Lockdown had never failed to bring in a bounty, and so some kind of absurd, too-large-to-comprehend, nigh-hysterical hopelessness actually led the various criminals to give up and establish a rapport with him when they could… maybe hoping for a little mercy if their serial code ever showed up on the list.

One such outing found Lockdown hunched over the blue-lit fuel bar with a double-cube of bright pink energon in-servo, optics fixed on the vid-screen at the back of the club when they weren't flickering between the two overcharged goons to his left, preparing to pick a fight with each other. It was a normal enough stop: he told Prowl he wanted some background on a case they were thinking of taking up, but the bike suspected that he just needed to get out of the ship and wasn't inclined to raise protest. The silent ninjabot was seated not far from where his partner was chumming it up with the other drinkers, at Lockdown's back and thoroughly detached from it all, his coolant practically untouched.

To see a 'bot who actually showed up with Lockdown then left the same way, close to his thorny side, was a little radically unheard of. The 'partner' was a recent acquisition, but everyone soon grew accustomed to the ninjabot's disinterested and surprisingly intact presence. Most of the mechs there had been through hard times and had not a few scratchy grey plating grafts, after all, so the black and gold mech was most definitely the hottest thing in the bar: a fact which caused _one_ relatively tame hook-related upset that nonetheless made everyone realize just who the little ninjabot belonged to and why it was best not to call him 'the bike with the glossy aft that anyone would bend over a berth.'

The aforementioned (or afore-slandered) bike looked over as his partner's communicator trilled sharply, receiving a ghost signal in his own commlink. The noise interrupted what was to be the climax of a particularly filthy story Lockdown had been weaving for the past half-megacycle; he grumbled and took the call, not even bothering to move to the back room.

Everyone in the dark bar went quiet out of something more than respect as the connection went through and the small datapad-like device lit up. A dark-plated 'bot waited on the other side, filling the bounty hunter in briefly but fully about a bootlegger that was lurking in his area. A petty criminal, to be sure, but one that was turning out to be more trouble than he was worth. Of course, his organization couldn't spare the resources (or the dignity) to hunt him down themselves, and thus had come to Lockdown for the job. A commission, from one neutral to another.

Lockdown's optics only flickered up once during the spiel, and that was to see if the 'bot in question, seated four down from him, was running yet.

"Yeah. Yeah, that dumbaft. Think I might know where's he's holed up," Lockdown mused slowly, shifting to look back at his partner. Prowl's sharp blue visor was fixed beyond him, neither approving nor disapproving, but taking in the antics of a particular 'bot who obviously didn't know how things worked around that section of town.

While also horribly overcharged on high-grade, Mr. Dumbaft, a grunt Insecticon, didn't quite realize the respect all the patrons treated Lockdown with had a mirror-side: intense, crushing fear. With that misunderstanding taking center stage, he obviously thought all of it was a marvelous joke. That would have explained why he started making faces, vaulting off of his stool and knocking into things as the call went on. The rest of the patron's optics grew impossibly wide and bright as the forboding silence grew thicker, broken only by the unsteady clunk of the wanted mech's pedes and his superior snickering.

"Grand up if I can bring him up in the next megacycle," Lockdown pressed brusquely, grinning his gap-toothed grin.

"No bonus offered for timely retrieval. All we need is him in cuffs," the neutral mech said stolidly. He was obviously bored, as the mech in question was a bit of a pest and even making the call to take him in was slightly degrading. He had much better things to be doing, and it showed in his flat facial plating. "You have your assignment. Here's his energy signature and the number for your credit transfer: it will become accessible after we have received official statement that he's enroute from your nearest Autobot outpost. Go."

"Gotcha, chief."

Lockdown mock-saluted the mech and closed the commscreen, then calmly went back to his drink. The silence of the bar was broken with odd, scattered laughter—but only from the unhinged bots who could find some humor in staring at the stupid mech who wasn't bothering to run, but cackling his primitive segmented jaw off.

Lockdown smirked into his drink, long and easy. Prowl twitched morosely behind him, visor narrowing an inch. Then the musclecar turned to the ugly 'bot, leaning over the back of his chair, and said:

"Run."

The Insecticon's orange optics, all flickering instability, nearly popped out of his sockets, then he screamed with laughter again.

"Primuzzz, you izzzz riot! Thizzz your version of… profezzzional courtezzzzy? Bee-utiful, bee-utiful!"

"My only professional courtesy is to the pretty bot behind me." The old bounty hunter turned back to his drink, then thumbed at the open door behind him. "You got two megacycles. Run."

The diminutive mech finally realized, whether from the utter silence or the collection of blank or pitying stares directed at him, that Lockdown was dead serious.

He froze, then whimpered loudly, stumbling off of his chair and trying to _process_ the whole thing through his sudden underestimated rush of fear. A few overturned stools and the musclecar's target bolted out of the place, wing-structures buzzing in a panic. Lockdown threw his head back and laughed, abrasive and wild, then muttered some angerless defamation into his cube.

He felt rather than heard Prowl come up behind him, arms crossed.

"You could have saved us a good deal of time," the bike said in a suffering tone—the one that said he would be pouting if they were alone. Or, at least, Prowl's version of a pout, which was very un-pout-like. Lockdown just chuckled and reached out for him, looking up at his partner with that damned roguish charm.

"Cool your engines, ninjabot. What's the good of extra time if you got nothin' to fill it? This is our _job_."

Perhaps due that same roguish charm, Prowl's protests were short-lived, deflating with a somewhat affectionate sigh. He was what most would call 'uptight'—always focusing on increasing the efficiency of motion, when mechs like Lockdown were in it for the sloppy hedonist chase. Lockdown, perhaps, was the sole creature that kept his function from spiraling into inflexible routine. Fighting to keep his smile small and bland, the ninjabot still allowed himself to be led onto Lockdown's hip-wheel, cocking his slender leg for comfort and unintentionally drawing half of the optics in the bar.

"If they don't care when I bring him in, they can go stew in their own fluids," he growled cantankerously, exhibiting his well-adjusted, sly sense of humor. The old bounty hunter always had to squeeze some kind of personal satisfaction out of it, and his new favorite hobby was dinging the neutral 'bots diodes. Clearly quite pleased with himself, Lockdown scraped his white mouth over Prowl's shoulder, tasting a little gloss.

"'Sides," he muttered into his cup with a wink, big servo on the little bike's waist. The bounty hunter made the other's facial plating heat up slightly with a pinch to some hidden wiring. "I haven't finished my drink yet."

The old mech never wasted a drop of the best things in function, be that high-grade, a fun hunt, or Prowl.


	56. What's in a Designation

A/N: Prowl feels a little feisty some days—and it's more about making Lockdown admit that he did it than hoping it will happen again. (This isn't the first time he's used that word, yes. I know he used it in the forest-hunt, but that's been deleted, so it's the first time for Prowl.)

Random: In the little measurement at the end, I know I've been referring to Lockdown as being two tons, so I'm going with the excuse that Cybertronian metal is EFFING DENSE and heavy.

* * *

What's in a Designation

* * *

Lockdown was always a little loopy after getting defragged.

Every 'bot had to do it, of course, but he'd grown to hate it more in the recent century because Prowl made him do it in a consistent and timely fashion _and_ coddled him as much as possible afterward: staying nearby, asking if he needed anything, offering to help with the projects the musclecar was invariably in the middle of at the time of said defragging. The shameful treatment only stopped when Lockdown roared at him to get out or threw something at his helm (or the general five-span vicinity: defrags did nothing for his accuracy or depth perception).

It was so infuriating, that something meant to bring little bits back together again made him feel like he was playing hide-and-scan with his core memory. His older systems just didn't take to it. He liked things being where he'd put them more than he liked having them in the _right_ _place_, and that included files. Lockdown rubbed his audios, trying to keep focused on what he was repairing if just to get the damned thing and all of its pieces off of his workbench.

It all started with Prowl browsing the Feed. He'd come across an ad requesting a jumper-canon: the alien merchant offered twenty-thousand for a fully functional model, XP-2 or higher.

"You own one, do you not?"

"Yeah. S'busted though," Lockdown had mumbled, not looking up from his screen.

"What would it take to repair it?"

He crunched those figures for a moment, accessing the blueprints he'd downloaded along with the purchase some three millennia ago.

"New insulation, pins on the trigger and some other scrap. Little under twelve-hundred in credits."

"The merchant would be willing to pay twenty-thousand credits for it."

"We can make triple that in the first two megacycles of a hunt," the bounty hunter snorted, but Prowl only tilted his helm and smiled.

"Every bit helps." He turned, then finished all too lightly, "In fact, after your poor investment demolished our collective accounts, twenty-thousand would be a pleasant start."

Lockdown would have bent to check if his aft was still attached if he hadn't been sitting on it, but then, that was Prowl's version of a 'gentle reminder' whenever he got too grumpy about small pay-offs. He… owed a lot to the kid. It wasn't his place to grumble, so he sucked it up and fixed the canon and sent the old thing off.

But the debt was just the current excuse: Prowl had been working on him for some time about money stuff. This 'fix-up' sham was just another one of his ploys to encourage the mythical _financial stability_, and Prowl didn't even bother to hide it. With all of the little bot's methods, which invariably took away the rough and tumble, unpredictable nature of his job that the old bounty hunter taken such pride in mastering stellar-cycle after stellar-cycle, Lockdown swore the ninjabot sucked all the fun out of function.

Well. Half the fun.

…Even if it was a _different_ kind of fun, it was still—okay, the little 'bot had _changed_ something and Lockdown wasn't all that happy about it even if there were other things to be happy about.

Eventually, having nothing better to do and _not_ because it was a good idea in the slightest, he repaired a grappler and put up an ad for it on the Feed. The five grand in credits was barely a hop in his account, but at least it moved junk and gave him something to do during dry spells—not, again, that it was a good or frugal idea. It came to be that he didn't even have to troll the feed himself: Prowl came to him with any reports and he got to fixing.

It was fairly mindless work, which found the old mech poking at an insulator coil on a gun he'd taken apart and now didn't have the foggiest idea what it had looked like originally.

This was not good. Lockdown squinted, flipping through blue-prints again (after he _found_ them, hiding in the back of his files where the defrag had ignorantly crammed them), then realized the adaptor for the tool he needed was all the way across the room and grumbled down to his core. Prowl, however, was puttering nearby _like always_, so the bounty hunter just put out a servo and gestured toward the piece.

"Wouldja toss me that, darlin'?"

Prowl turned around.

"What?"

It was said with just a little more emphasis than simple misunderstanding would call for, especially since he lurked on the fringes _just_ for the sake of assisting Lockdown when he needed it—or so was his Samaritan cover. Lockdown shuttered his optics hazily.

"That. Over there. That… thing, with the… other thing. Blue thing."

Oh Primus, his banks were crucified. His verbal relays were scrap. No nouns, no nothing, all stuffed where they were 'supposed to be'. Prowl, however, didn't care in the slightest that he wasn't making any sense.

"No. What did you… just call me?"

"…I'm a little slagged-up in the CPU right now," Lockdown growled by way of explanation or excuse, innards grinding uncomfortably as he pulled together just enough memory to realize what he _had_ said. He averted his optics as Prowl straightened, crossing his arms across his rounded chassis.

"Now, that, uh—the blue _skinny_ thing--"

"Did I register you correctly?"

Lockdown sputtered, then growled, pushing himself up from his seat--the small, dark inside of his ship swayed alarmingly, stabilizers spitting nothing but electronic white noise.

"Fine, I'll get it myself—"

He was glaring at the shelf and pretending he was glaring at Prowl, because _how_ could the brat abuse an aching model this way, but Prowl actually walked over and seized the adaptor and held it away from the much larger mech, petite mouth quirked curiously.

"I have it for you. When you tell me what you called me."

"_Goddamn_—rewind and dig in your own banks if you wanna know so slaggin' bad, you little brat!"

"But that wouldn't be half as satisfying," Prowl said urbanely, still holding the item aloft.

Lockdown couldn't hope to win a game of keep-away with the ninjabot, as out-of-sync as his relays and sensors were (nor hope to keep his dignity intact by engaging in one), and so hissed and snarled about how the elitist brat could sink so low when he felt like it. He ground his dentals, glaring at his partner.

"Gimme one good reason not to crunch your helm like an ammunition shell."

"One reason: you are physically incapable of doing so at the moment. Another: even if you were, you could not catch me."

"I hate you."

"Your charming colloquialisms say otherwise, partner."

"One more big word and I'll tie your fairings in a bow, _kid_."

"Simply repeat what you said and I will leave you be… unless you desire another jug of coolant, in which case I will fetch it for you. You are running low."

"With help like yours, I would've offlined myself millennia ago."

"Lockdown."

"…Darlin'," Lockdown hissed.

"Darling," Prowl repeated after a long, long silence, visor glowing curiously.

Lockdown nearly winced. It sounded so much _filthier_ with Prowl's impeccable enunciation and practiced lilt. He snorted out hot air, insides grinding; waiting for the bike's next smart-aft comment and impending attempt at blackmail, hardly knowing if he had the function left to fend him off properly. Then Prowl made a singularly odd, smiling expression, moved to his table, handed him the adaptor and walked out of the shop.

"Call me if you have need of me."

Lockdown stared after the little black bike, abused processor voiding violently. When he gathered enough of himself back together—which took a while—he threw the piece down on the table and yelled out:

"You confuse the slag outta me, you know that, kid?! You're wired so fraggin' backwards I'm surprised you don't switch your fender and your exhaust pipe when you transform!"

Somewhere down the hallway, he heard Prowl's soft chuckle bounce around in the hallway before his door shut. The massive bounty hunter finally picked up his tool and returned to work with a stymied, vexed growl, wondering how he ever ended up with such a pile of loose screws for a partner. When Prowl called him 'precious one' a few solar-cycles later (_after_ Lockdown endured a thirty-cycle comm-call conversation with an all-too-smug Torque where every second word was 'darling'), he chucked the half-finished gun at the ninjabot's helm and had the workshop to himself for a full afternoon.

The respite of smug smiles gave him time enough to fix the Primus-forsaken gun and come to terms with a startling and depressing realization: he, an anti-social monster and one of the most feared bounty hunters in the circuit, couldn't make half-ton Prowl run scared if he tried.


	57. Distance

A/N: Mawwwww. Explicit version (YAY FINALLY GOOSHY RECONNECTION SEX) is at the Big People website.

If you're still reading this, guys, please let me know :] I'd appreciate it.

* * *

Distance

* * *

Prowl watched his partner pack up near-to two months supply of condensed energon, tracking the motions and considerate pauses from his perch in Lockdown's navigator chair… and still quite unsure of how he felt about this.

The pair of hunters had received an urgent invoice from a scientific community located somewhere in the Sigma quadrant. Their specialization was genetic engineering and one of their top-secret experiments, when taken out for a test drive on an unpopulated planet, had thrashed his play-pen, gutted two field-techs and taken off into the brush howling. They needed it back and, considering the feral thing was practically a very angry pile of two-and-a-half billion credits, they needed it back alive.

While it was a strange case to begin with, it was made stranger by the pronoun 'we', which brought all negotiation to a screeching halt.

Unfortunately, the scientists' contact had only recommended Lockdown's expertise in hunting things that needed to be hunted—not Prowl's. They had heard nothing of the ninjabot, much less his skills, and were uneasy to allow a wild card in on such a delicate catch. In the end, Lockdown alone was to secure the bounty. Any deviation and they would not receive full payment, and the two mechs needed full payment.

As they hovered above the uninhabited planet, Lockdown packed up for his one-mech assault. Prowl was to drop him off near where the creature had last been located, then return to the atmosphere to wait it out until Lockdown hailed him down. In went liquid nitrogen, to make the energon viscous and stretch a little longer; next, several firearms and surveillance cameras hit the bottom with a thud. The musclecar glared at the contents of his metal magazine, then tossed in an extra jug of medical oil and Prowl hoped suddenly—sharply—that he wouldn't need it.

All too soon, he was done.

"Good hunting," Prowl said a little oddly, still discomfited that he was being left behind. The air-lock opened and a sudden wave of heat invaded the ship, wet and sulfur-scented. Lockdown nodded at him in the doorway, hoisting the magazine over his spiked shoulder.

"Be back."

No approximation. No estimate. Just a simple promise of his return. The air-lock slammed shut and the ship was dark and cool once more.

It only took a week of sitting in orbit before the ninjabot stopped trying to convince himself he was enjoying the silence.

He had weathered far longer stretches without a mission to get his oil pumping, but Prowl's function quickly became listless and echoing without the old musclecar. He drifted aimlessly from room to room, venting gloomy drafts of air and touching things. Being a productive creature, he tried to focus his processor and his excess energies on his practices—meditation, Metallikato—but all he could feel when he reached out his static field was _nothing_. That warm, rough, bold smear of sentient energy, dozing or reclining or slaving away over a table, was absent: the void Lockdown left was beyond palpable, and it drove Prowl mad in a slow, sullen way.

His partner was gone for a month and a half down in the jungle. Forty-five solar cycles of peaceful solitude sounded so much better when Lockdown was _there_ to leave him alone. As it was, it was just maddening to be forced to wait in an empty ship: an empty ship… who still reached out to him sometimes, in her ghostly way. Melancholy was added to his list of character flaws.

Not only that, but he was… malfunctioning slightly.

The ache began as a kind of exhaustion, but soon spiraled into a focused throb in his Spark. It was enough of a jolt to bring him to a halt during little activities, though it departed the next moment, leaving him stymied and strangely lonely. It almost felt as though the center of him was wilting. It was directly connected to the same thing that was making him pace Moot's cold halls, surely, and it made him recharge on Lockdown's scratched-up berth just once, so he could be where the musclecar's gritty scent was strongest, even if the disappointment of rebooting alone stayed with him that entire empty solar-cycle.

A hundred miles down, Lockdown grunted and crammed a servo to his Sparkchamber for the fifteenth time, muttering about damned flutters as he threaded a cable-trap.

As caught as he was in melancholy and routine alike, Prowl didn't truly consider how unthinkable the strange situation was: for Lockdown to leave his precious ship, a bounty hunter's livelihood incarnate, in somebody else's care. He didn't truly think about how, if the scientists had lost their beast a century and a half earlier, the bounty hunter would have laughed himself sore at the idea of letting anyone go free _in his ship_, partner or no, much less leaving them to watch over it without a full-system lock. No, he would have left Prowl somewhere decent, rigged up a paging system and sent Moot into waiting orbit before entrusting anyone with her full faculties.

But there he was, literally tossing Prowl the keys to his function, when he knew she still liked Prowl better than him; leaving with little more than a nod and expecting Prowl to wait while the angry, eternally suspicious mech entered into a mission that would have been the perfect opportunity for anyone with a gigabyte of sense to leave him to offline in an organic gutter.

In these times, as in most slow and silent relationships, Prowl couldn't see the forest for the trees—or the mech he waited for so loyally, deep in that same forest with a servo to his stinging chamber.

* * *

Too far into the future, Lockdown clomped onto the ship, shaking the dirt off of his gnarled pedes and looking around almost warily. Prowl emerged from the velvety darkness, visor glowing brightly even if he sported only the most demure of smiles.

"Welcome back," he said softly, closing the air-lock behind his partner. Lockdown shook himself—he was in a state, brittle organic matter poking out of his armor-chinks while mud crumbled from his white facial plating, both raining down on the spotless bridge floor—and tossed down his magazine with relish.

"What a slaggin' hunt."

"And your trophy?"

It may have seemed like perfunctory banter, but it was a fleshy reconnection for the two 'bots: that of basic togetherness, their two dissimilar personalities making a satisfying scrape when ground against each other after the void of solitude. A thousand connotations swirled underneath the disarmingly simple exchange they endured by habit, perhaps if only to heighten the final and most primal of reconnections.

"Nah. I bagged 'im. Contractors'll come and pick it up. Don't want that thing in my ship." Lockdown went to his spiny knees to dig for a jar of solvent, then looked over his shoulder-plating, expression hard and thrilled. "Tellin' you, that thing could've ripped a hole in this ship a span wide without even windin' up for it. Like a laser through gold."

"I am relieved to see you in one piece, then," Prowl said, crossing his arms. "I'm afraid I wouldn't have much use for you otherwise."

"I got all my pieces, kid—now if you wanna double-scan the real important ones…"

Lockdown trailed off, having had enough of talk, but when he turned to look, Prowl was already gone.

He should have known it: neither one of them was known for prolonged displays of relief or even emotion in general. The little ninjabot had already done his duty, and so retreated. He was probably disappointed to have the old 'bot intrude upon his Happy Ninja Time, really, with all that processor-numbing quiet to himself.

The bounty hunter shrugged but had to smile when, once he was freshly cleaned of all the organic slag and entrenched in his massive chair, pede-steps approached him again. He swiveled the chair in time to see Prowl exiting the storage hallway with a thrumming cube of high-grade in-servo, visor locked on him with his usual quiet, distant fondness.

"I thought you may have missed the finer things civilization has to offer," he said simply, long face sweetened with another smile.

Lockdown's motor growled in anticipation, optics lighting with a fierce happiness at the sight of the pretty cube—he had been surviving on the lowest grade possible, as he couldn't afford to be even slightly buzzy down in the jungle--then looked at the slender, gold-trimmed bot holding it. When the other came close enough, Lockdown actually overreached for the cube and instead took Prowl's carpal joint, tugging him closer. Prowl came with the proper amount of knowing resistance and slid smoothly onto the chair when he could, tucking himself over Lockdown's spread legs and minding his spiked wheels.

Still, the old musclecar didn't take the cube from him, but rather tilted the younger mech's servo up and drank from it, taking the first gulp of fluorescent, innard-stimulating ecstasy with a half-shudder. Once the pink buzz had reached his processor, Lockdown looked up at the mech on his lap.

"Pit if you aren't earnin' your keep, ninjabot," he rumbled as he sat back, red optics glowing warmly. "Knew there was a reason I kept you around."

"Really. And what would that be?" Prowl asked as archly as Prowl ever did.

Lockdown didn't miss the luxurious lilt of his vocals, or the quirk of his small, pretty mouth. The pink cube went by the wayside as the big mech required one of his servos, then both, to properly grip his partner's tiny frame. The tingling taste of high-grade lingered on in his mouth as Prowl added his own scent and taste with small, dearly-missed clicks and shudders and quiet aspirations.

The two mechs fell into each other more quickly than they ever had, each seeking to officially end their separation with a binge of heat and scraping contact. In the beginning, due to not a little desperation, it was no more than a disorganized fit of groping: Prowl's delicate servos cupped and stroked his partner's brutal angles, whereas Lockdown's digits were splayed, rubbing and gripping cream plating hungrily. The world—hot and escalating though it was—nearly stopped when Lockdown purred roughly against Prowl's black audio guard and, decisively, Prowl turned his helm.

It put them mouth to mouth, helms brushing. A hesitant puff of air escaped the ninjabot before he—carefully, slowly—kissed white, silent Lockdown on the mouth, digits cupping his chin. It was long and quiet, longer and quieter still when the younger mech drew back, a hesitant tenderness freezing him, but the soft, steady blue of Prowl's visor claimed the small betrayal of their code of conduct—the code that said any kiss had to be a product of passion or pleasure, brutal and instinctual. Certainly not tender or overwhelmed or intimate, and certainly not with such crushing sincerity that caused the musclecar himself to stall for a good cycle.

Stunned, suddenly all too aware of how much he had missed the small, young, _perfect_ thing against his chassis, Lockdown uncertainly pressed back with his hard mouth, then quickly rushed it on to other things like a spooked Sparkling groping at his first love, afraid to make mistakes in the quiet spaces in-between.

* * *

Lockdown booted up slowly, visual feed onlining last; the first thing he saw was the gleam off of a gold-lined helmet. Prowl was still out on his lap, arms looped around his neck, but his refreshed Spark pulsed clean and sweet in his candied black chassis, beautifully close to his own. Finally.

For all the miles of sweaty atmosphere and cold space in between them, Lockdown had felt every inch of it in his ragged red Spark. It could have been the blockers, reacting to the 'testing' of their disguised bond. But, blockers or no, never had his center wavered for any 'bot.

With that small, reassuring energy burning close, the musclecar felt something settle and reconnect after scalding solar-cycles of danger, stranded without so much as an electrical whisper to hear in the jungle... but it still wasn't enough. Lockdown leaned back in his chair with a blind, warm rumble, shuttering his optics and nudging Prowl into his thorny neck, making sure their chambers could hum softly to each other. He waited.

When Prowl onlined with a soft intake of air half a megacycle later, the bike smiled almost shyly, and the distance was finally gone.


	58. Open Position

A/N: This one feels weird to me, mostly because the last time I made a throw-away OC it was Anicon (AUUUGHHHH) but I hope it's a LITTLE amusing. Also, I love seeing Prowl like this XD Guilty, guilty pleasure.

Random: FFFFT courtesy of Eno, I just found out that the canonical name of Lockdown's ship is THE DEATH'S HEAAAAAAAAAD. Lawwwwwl. Poor little Moot, you would have been so very bad-ass! :pats her: Maybe he TRIED to re-name you that and you stalled and threw fits until he dropped it…

Thank you so much for reading, guys :3

* * *

Open Position

* * *

"I warn you, she's not your average target."

"They don't come to me for 'average'. They come to me 'cos they don't got anybot else to go to," Lockdown growled impatiently, chomping the last of his fat rust stick—and ignoring the horribly disappointed look his partner was shooting him from off-screen. He leaned back, scraping the crumbly bits off of his digits. Prowl exited, pace huffy.

The musclecar snarled quietly to himself. Prowl had been harassing him about how unhealthy the sticks were ever since he got back into the habit of chewing them--but the 'bot on the other side of the screen clearly thought the motor-roar was intended for him. The negotiator refreshed his vocalizer nervously, blue optics dropping down.

"Exactly. This outlaw has tech that has enabled her to, ah… evade low-level law enforcement on any planet she's been cornered on: tech no one has been able to hold onto her long enough to scan or explain. That, and some kind of device that can manipulate 'bots processors. She's no danger, physically, but she's caused so much trouble that we want her brought in and the council—"

"Don't gimme reasons, gimme a price," Lockdown interrupted him, nodding at the under-built mech on the screen. "How much?"

The price was enough to bother with. Guess he really was the last 'bot they'd come to. He accepted the download—profile, description, surveillance shots, rumors—and sent the little mech running. Lockdown flashed through the information he was given, then sat back with an uneasy rumble. While times hadn't been slow… the need for money had kept them busier than usual, plumbing the cleaner and less dangerous, but therefore lower priced, recesses of the Feed.

This felt a little like a circus-run, and he was right. A low-level thief whose only claim to fame was being able to squirm her way out of being captured. Content-wise, it didn't sound worth his time, but money was money. _And_ Prowl was keeping obnoxiously close tabs on his partner's gaping debt. The bounty hunter didn't know what torqued him off more: the fact that Prowl was just doing it to keep him in line, or the fact that he deserved to be kept in line for a while.

Grumbling, Lockdown reached behind him, absently pawing for another one of his sticks even as the taste of rust was still clogging his sensors in a slightly nauseating way. He batted around for a few seconds before he realized the entire box was nowhere to be found.

"Where're my sticks?" he demanded of no one in particular.

He looked around to find Prowl standing behind him, his visor a little wider than normal—a look of mindful aqua innocence as unsuited for the bike as a red and white paint-job. Lockdown booted up his vocalizer, about to make a very correct guess, when there came a strange, dull sound from behind him.

He turned around, optics narrowed. It was a klik before he could make sense of the little cylinders in the black of space, but yes, his rust-sticks were definitely floating by the ship's red-tinted window, clunking gently into the hull like little snack-shaped balloons. Very expensive, Peunl-ordered snack-shaped balloons. That he'd just opened that morning.

"You're feelin' a little cocky today, ain'tcha?" he growled at length, knowing better than to bring up price.

"I have no idea what you are talking about," Prowl said pleasantly, sporting a maddeningly blank smile as he snitched his olive data-pad from the download slot and took the files to his quarters for his own perusal.

Hard as he tried to be pissed, Lockdown's optics _still_ followed his trim little aft all the way to the hallway. When there was nothing more to ogle, the bounty hunter leaned back and cleared the gunk from his fuel intake with a sickly engine-rev. Something creaked, then crunched, and his optics widened.

Alright. Maybe he'd better lay off. …Then again, that would be indirectly admitting that the little punk was right.

He'd buy another box on Belbourne.

* * *

The target was easy to track. She hadn't avoided imprisonment by avoiding law enforcement, after all, but rather by escaping once the forces followed her ridiculously obvious paper-trails. Lockdown was already sullen by the time they arrived at the bar, downright balking that he'd only had to _threaten_ to break one 'bot's servo before the two knew exactly where the femme was hiding—_or just idling in plain sight._

The bar was small, creaky and low-lit, like most Cybertronian hide-aways in that neck of the woods. Their kind weren't exactly wanted on Belbourne, and thus were only given permits to build and host businesses in the filthiest portions of the industrial-based planet's stratified cities. She was a dark blue femme, as per the description and stats: wiry as they come and generally unattractive, standing just a few inches short of Lockdown's height. Lockdown, as noted, was pretty fragging tall.

It was a crowded place, but crowds learned to part pretty quick for those with a mission and a big enough firearm. At the click of a disarmed safety, bots fanned left and right—some, recognizing Lockdown or the predatory and contracted gleam in his optics, even bolted for the door, running faster or slower depending on the size and heft of their illegal hobbies. Once the dust cleared, the femme looked back. She squinted slightly at the huge bristly mech and the little bike half-hidden at his side, and then turned around with a stricken look in her red optics.

It was not, however, any sort of prelude to escape. Instead of turning tail and burning rubber like she should have, 'Slipshod' slammed her half-empty energon cube down at the bar with enough force to combust it, pointy dentals gleaming between her pale lip-components.

"Lockdown! I've been waiting for you for _eons_," she crowed, then took an almost admonishing pose at the bar, one skinny leg cocked. "What took you so long to come after me?"

The entire bar was deathly silent. Those who had not yet slipped out did so, leaving them in a deserted hovel with creaking hinges and the ugly buzz of neon. The frozen femme smiled on and on, optics locked on the musclecar.

"Another one of your _friends_?" Prowl inquired too-politely at Lockdown's elbow, remembering his first encounter with Torque. The ninjabot regarded the criminal curiously, wondering if he could abide another femme of the pink trans-model's type. Probably not.

…_Definitely_ not. Prowl frowned. Well, one of them would have to go, and Torque was a little easier on the optics. Having made his (their) decision, Prowl's aforementioned hidden optics flickered to his partner, surprised to find the musclecar vibrating with something strangely like unease.

"Not this time," Lockdown growled once he had found his vocals, matching the femme's stare pixel for pixel and more confused than he would ever admit.

The femme had seen him before, that was certain—knew his name. But the glitch was, he didn't know whether this was a nut-case or someone he'd pissed off a long time ago, because he hadn't even recognized her from the recon files and that saccharine, playful tone plainly spooked the Pit out of him. Huffing fondly, as though this were all a familiar routine, the homely femme walked forward, stiletto heel-struts clicking against the metal floor. She raised her arms, smirking--Lockdown's servo went for his pistol, tensors twisting tight—and then abruptly lunged toward him.

Lockdown was trained to handle most assaults, and that particular attack found him dumbly clutching her brittle frame to his scratched-up chassis. It was a move intended to lock her limbs and prevent any real damage the (now assuredly crazy, not pissed) femme would want to inflict on him at that distance, such as stabbing or shooting, but since she seemed mightily content to just loll in his arms with her engine purring full-power, it just came off as an excruciating and clumsy embrace.

Slipshod returned it in spades as she squeezed his beastly frame tight for a moment then craned back, staring up into his painfully wide optics.

"It's finally you! Primus, you look even more beautiful than the holograms."

"_What_?"

The force and intensity of the old bounty hunter's confusion, as demonstrated in his nearly inarticulate roar, did nothing to curb her enthusiasm. She grinned another pale fish grin and used Lockdown's unshakable grip on her to hike her legs up and lock them around his waist, cuddling closer in the musclecar's death-grip.

"I'm all yours. Make me your partner!" she pleaded, nuzzling into his spiked neck. "We'll travel the galaxy together! We'll make billions and nothing will ever stop us! Please, oh _please_, make me your partner, you big bounty-bot!"

"Already… got one'a them," Lockdown grunted dumbly, like he was talking about a certain variety of plasma canon. Prowl, who was located a little to his left and hadn't moved a gear since the bizarre attack began, arched an optic ridge. Their target stiffened and glared over the musclecar's arm, optics immediately darkening to a dangerous mauve.

"_Him_?" she barked with a disgust that had months, possibly _stellar-cycles_ of brooding jealousy behind it. She snorted hot air through her vents, sneering at the small bike. "He's not permanent. Just an alliance. A temporary fix, isn't that right 'Downer?"

His optics unfocused a little, half due to her crazy talk and half due to the fact she was now pinching surreptitiously at one of his 'happy spot' shoulder spikes; he shook his head raggedly.

"He's as permanent as they—" Lockdown shook his head, harder this time, and his optics (and his processor) lit with a flash. "Whaddya--_get yer aft off'a me_!"

He succeeded in prying her skinny little grasshopper frame off of him with several painful-sounding squeaks. Courting such lethal disorientation, he was hardly aware that it would have been the perfect time to cuff her and be done with it—as it was, she managed to cleave close to him again and swirl her servos along his hip-wheels with a sly grin.

"Surely your tastes run a little… sweeter than that. You're a femme-fanatic, from what I've heard—and I hope the rest of what they say is true, because I haven't met a 'bot who likes it rougher than me." Before he could react to that, Slipshod pulled away and looked at the burly musclecar as though viewing the Allspark itself, big red optics burning so brightly it looked painful. He shifted, bewildered, in his old, spiny black and green plating, suddenly too-aware of the wicked curve of his shoulder-spikes and his massive ridged pedes. "Primus. I've been being bad for _ages_ hoping they would send you to get me."

Finally, things lined up a little. Lockdown was well-known among the circuit, but a shady, brutal kind of well-known. A kind of 'bot you hear about more than see. She, obviously an ex-Con, had been trying to _lure_ him? What—to try and become his partner? His old (and recently de-fragged) processor nearly kinked at the thought.

He was ruthless! He was evil! He hated 'bots and he didn't _take partners_!

… That little bike over there excluded.

"The _Pit_--you thought a string'a petty theft charges was gonna hook me?" Lockdown demanded, hardly knowing what he was saying even as he suddenly felt duped and demeaned as a bounty hunter for being sent after this clown. This wasn't worth his time, his trouble, or his dignity. He shook his head, engine nearly snarling. "They only sent me in 'cos you kept slippin' away from everybot else!

"And I _know_ you're the mech that's finally going to take me down and cuff me up properly," she growled, eying him from helm to pelvic plating, her servo following suit with an aggressive scrape.

He was a little aroused, admittedly. Far more spooked, but a little aroused.

Prowl didn't seem to have an opinion on the scraggly femme assaulting, groping and propositioning his partner. He contented himself with leaning against a booth and simply observing, his visor a neutral blue. Because of how perfectly motionless the ninjabot was, it took Prowl reaching up to wipe a bit of grit off of his facial plates before the unhinged femme looked over at him, instantly bristling like an offended organic at the sight of the armored bike.

"Get out of here," she growled, roughly hooking her leg over Lockdown's hip-wheel again and jerking him close. "He has me, now. Lockdown doesn't require your services anymore."

Make no mistake, Lockdown _liked_ Prowl's services (Primus, what that 'bot could do with a single digit and a dollop of high-grade) and didn't want them to go anywhere anytime soon, but that snotty statement had an unexpected positive effect: it got the ninjabot up and sighing, patience spent.

"Enough."

Prowl stepped forward with the stasis cuffs in-servo, his thinned visor belying his impatience. Glaring at him and the cuffs, Slipshod stepped back from Lockdown, gave a quick, ugly smirk and disappeared off the face of the planet with a shimmer of pixels. It was so sudden, even Lockdown's plating contracted in surprise, leaving him glaring around the deserted bar.

The cloaking device was so intense that the bounty hunter couldn't even register her signal anymore: there wasn't even a distortion wherever she was hiding… and, sadly enough, not a hint of what she'd do with that cover, unpredictable as she was. If Lockdown had any chastity left, he would have probably been in fear for it. Luckily, he wasn't protoformed with that cumbersome little faculty, and thus was just watching his aft for as many reasons as he could justify.

(Still a little aroused. But just a little.)

"Impressive trick," Prowl said, optics whizzing to and fro behind his visor. Lockdown cursed and moved toward the door (_this_ was the tech they were talking about), but his petite partner merely began walking the length of the room, stasis cuffs dangling from one servo.

When he reached the end of the bar, he paused. He looked up, as though scrutinizing the abandoned bar's pitiful selection of fuel—then he grabbed to the right of him, gripping what was apparently thin air, and yanked towards his body. There was a splitting shriek and their target flickered back into sight as she crashed to the bar's rusty floor; she landed on her knees, to match Prowl's tiny gold-trimmed height, red optics slitted with rage.

"Unfortunately, the crux of tricks is that they fail to work on everyone." Prowl smiled. "Please cooperate, ma'am. It will save us both the trouble."

She looked utterly apoplectic that he had figured said trick out, as she had been planning on knocking the bike out and absconding with Lockdown (who would doubtlessly fall helm over stabilizers with her at such a brutal feat) but this hiccup wasn't about to stop her. One look in her narrow facial plating said it: she had come to too far for anything but success.

"Save it, you little skank," she hissed, and something wound up inside her for a split-klik before bursting over her dark plating, making it so slippery that she jerked right out of Prowl's grip. His servo was tingling viciously; processor racing, he had barely texted Lockdown his estimate—a low-level EMP _shield_ that scrambled impulses and made her impossible to hold onto—before she climbed up on the bar, crouching like the hunted thing she was.

"You aren't even my concern," she sneered. She turned to Lockdown and her expression changed into something tenser, more passionate. "You've got me, big 'bot. I'll go in—if _you_ carry me there."

Bewildered silence provoked no further explanation, nor any flicker in that worshiping gaze. Lockdown squinted at her, hardly believing it.

None of his bounties had ever consented to being captured, much less begged to be carried back to the ship in his arms. The way she was walking into this made him incredibly dubious, especially considering the time she would do for all the property damage she'd wracked up in her stellar-cycles of 'luring' him. More-so, her enthusiasm could either go two ways: she was trying to throw him off balance and escape, or she really was horrendously infatuated with him. Or…. or both.

Bottom line, he still felt incredibly uneasy having her so close to him. _Dragging_ murderous, vicious captives in cuffed and muffled seemed easier than this, and, from the looks of it, he would have a hard time getting his servos on her slippery aft if he tried.

Stymied, he looked at Prowl, who gave his equivalent of a shrug: a twist of his servo and a visor-flash. It spoke common sense. As long as she was willing to go, they should take advantage of it. They could handle any escape attempt on her part, even if she unnerved the boiling Pit out of them doing it.

Feeling both incredibly stupid and thankful that the entirety of the bar had cleared out, Lockdown finally convinced his crusty mechanics to initiate a step forward and raised his arms for her. She lit up with a stifled electronic note of glee and swung herself into his arms, immediately locking her arms around his thick neck and curling against his chest-plating, venting a deep gust of air and growling happily.

And so the bounty hunter carried their captive back to the ship, Prowl trailing behind with his arms crossed and his narrowed visor locked on the femme's spider-like servos, each languidly tracing a neck-spike.

* * *

Thankfully, it only took them a small walk of shame to return to Moot, who actually trilled questioningly about the new presence; she was used to volatile Sparks and curtailed kicks and punches, and this glowing newcomer wasn't anyone she knew. Prowl soothed her with a covert pet on her hull. When Lockdown lumbered onto the bridge and set their bounty down, she stayed in his arms. Prowl clearly saw the older mech tense, most likely to shove her away, but a sudden click made him freeze, red optics locked on hers.

"Now that you've carried me over the threshold… give me a kiss, big 'bot," she purred, barely having to go to the tips of her pedes to be at the proper height—and Lockdown did not pull away. Prowl had not noticed that, halfway through the trek, Lockdown's steps had become strangely mechanical, as though someone else were pulling the strings.

Her thorny grin that of a conqueror, Slipshod kissed him. Grinding into motion, he kissed her, clutching her wiry form close. His claw-mod scraped possessively over her narrow aft, plating squeaking under the strain of his grip on her.

A moment later they parted with a stereo noise of pain, each turning to Prowl, who was holding the input jack he'd torn out of Lockdown's carpal port. The other end was wired into the femme's arm. She'd shot it into him, possibly as early as the factory-strip they had walked through. Lockdown shook his helm as though coming out of a fog, mismatched arms gone limp around her.

"An unwise choice," the ninjabot said softly, flicking the input to the side.

She groped for it, gasping, then made another noise as Lockdown, fully recovered with optics blazing, yanked her wiry weight up by the scruff of her neck-guard. He marched her to the holding cell—nothing more than a glorified closet—and held her still just long enough for Prowl to equip the stasis-cuffs, then tossed her in with a rage-filled snarl, uncaring whether she landed on her face or her aft. She landed on her former, with her latter in the air.

But, even as skinny as she was, Lockdown's scanner still stuck on her raised aft; clearly fighting the low-level stasis, she managed to crane her helm around and half-shutter her optics, pale mouth pursed seductively.

"Why don't you join me? You don't even have to take off the stasis cuffs. Does your prissy little bike let you do that to him?"

The old musclecar hadn't had a femme in a long time, and it showed in his optics—which widened suddenly when the door slammed shut, Prowl standing to the side with an unbearably condescending quirk of his visor.

He had the decency to feel a rush of something between frustration and some other growly emotion that didn't quite qualify as embarrassment but was pretty damn close. Motor giving an unhappy woof, Lockdown grumbled something about the coding from the override still running through him and walked off rubbing his helm, avoiding the cutting blue of his partner's judgment. His private quarters closed a while later, and Prowl could feel his signal ease into recharge. Frowning, the ninjabot shook his head disapprovingly and went to the bridge to key in their destination and watch the stars.

His partner still had some rough edges, that was for certain, but that was no excuse why the ninjabot couldn't quite stop thinking about stasis-cuffs' less... practical applications.

* * *

He went to fetch Lockdown when they were thirty cycles to landing. His partner should have already been out on the bridge, overseeing the process of announcing himself as a Neutral with an acquired bounty, but Prowl was practiced enough by now; besides, he suspected the primitive override software the femme used on him deserved a few more megacycles of recharge, if just to gather his frayed ends together.

Lockdown didn't take well to being ordered around, much less being forced to do things by his very coding. Prowl tried not to think too deeply on the infraction committed by the femme—his anger would rise otherwise, as dearly as those of his practice valued free will. Utilizing a weapon that their captors had crafted to make their race into slaves? It was simply barbaric, and even more so to find one of that same race using it so foolishly.

Sighing slightly, he padded to the musclecar's quarters and opened the door with a simple gesture.

"Lockdown. We have nearly arr—"

He stopped cold, one servo on the door-frame. Lockdown was flat on his berth, as expected, but on top of him, dark blue aft in the air, was their captive. She was murmuring to him, but stopped at the noise of the door hissing open. Her red optics glowed evilly as she looked around, bending so her mouth was half-pressed to the musclecar's white facial plating.

"Oh. It's the ex-partner," she cooed gloomily, kissing Lockdown below his strangely blank red optics.

Prowl's processor simply failed to make sense of the scene, even as the facts streamed in. The stasis cuffs were a poor and ignorant choice on his part, but the self-contained EMP field must have also bamboozled Moot into letting her out. The two mechs were so distracted by the use of her override device that they'd forgotten to think about it properly, and her cloaking device was such that she was able to sneak behind Prowl's back as he was meditating.

Prowl was a well-wired 'bot, however. He could handle an escape, yes, and was willing to admit a lapse in his normally crystalline judgment. He could even come to terms with a zealot that had somehow chosen his partner to idolize—but when the femme shifted and he saw the gunmetal glint of Lockdown's exposed chamber sitting between his retracted plating, all bets were off.

He lunged for her, grabbing her legs and flinging her down to the floor with a cacophonous crash. Her hiss escalated to a roar when Prowl landed atop her, expertly pinning her stick-thin limbs with his own as his servo gouged into her neck wiring. He kept her down even as she disappeared in spurts beneath him, then turned the nauseating EMP field on, making his whole front tingle maddeningly and his processor take a swerve or two. But with an insistent hum to steady himself, his tensors remained locked and he found the thick wire he needed: pinching it, she went limp, but her optics still smoldered up at him hatefully.

"Get your servos off of me, you under-built brat, he's _mine_," she yowled, still managing to make her pointy digits twitch for sheer force of rage. "He's been mine for stellar-cycles! You're the only thing standing in my wa—"

"_Did you touch him_?" When she only stared up at him, pale mouth open, his motor revved so loudly it nearly drowned out his next words. "Answer me. Did—you—_touch_—him?"

The image of this scrawny femme violating Lockdown made his mechanics knot, his processor void, his Spark clench. For the fourth time in his function, Prowl felt oil-lust heat his frame. A loss of payment--Pit, being cited by the council--wasn't even an issue if she had actually broached the old mech's center as he lay helpless.

The femme seemed incapable of thinking past her paralyzed limbs and her fury, but after a few kliks of having the armored bike aspirate unsteadily above her, Slipshod's angular facial plating slowly shifted with a serpentine slither—all to form a smug, proud smile. Her pointy dentals glittered.

"Yes. Yes, I did."

She was lying. He knew it immediately, but that wasn't a good enough reason to leave her in one piece. She laughed, loud and harsh, never seeing the beastly shiver of the small bike's plating.

"It was so warm. So gorgeous. I sunk my servos into his Spark until he—"

Prowl yanked her far enough off the ship's floor to make a spectacular clang when he slammed her back down, punching her across the helm so hard that there was a crack of pins and a shorted vocalizer. Her helm snapped to the side, two or three delicate facial plates skittering to the dark spaces underneath Lockdown's berth.

Even then, he pulled her back up, blade-thin visor coloring her battered face a dangerous teal.

"Attempt to touch my partner once more, in transit or otherwise, and they will be forced to reassemble you at the drop-off point," Prowl growled, cool vocals shivering with the force of his rage.

He could have been talking to an off-line 'bot, if not for the subtle insect buzz of her functioning audios, but he found he didn't quite care. Unable but to indulge the slow, secret outrage that had bubbled up from the moment she began to touch Lockdown, his servos tightened into her throat until they reached wires and something snapped and sparked so hard she twitched underneath him.

"You will be released eventually. If you come within a league of him, I will show no mercy. Do I make myself clear?"

A mutilated gurgle of her vocals was enough of an answer.

Prowl stood up and moved to the berth, yanking out the cord that was still streaming override input to Lockdown's carpal port. He watched coldly as Lockdown jolted up with a haggard electronic squawk, quivering like there were bubbles in his coding stream. The bounty hunter hacked and choked almost pathetically, groping to ease the stinging sensation at his violated carpal-port.

"She—rechargin'—"

"Make yourself decent," Prowl snapped, snatching up the limp femme by the pede and storming out of his partner's dark chamber, their captive's plating screeching over the metal floors behind him. "We land in twenty-three cycles."

The door slammed shut, leaving Lockdown alone with a processor ache from the Pit and an inexplicable flood of guilt. After a cycle of staring into the dark, he vented so hard he nearly decompressed and fell back on the berth, whole frame aching. The exhaustion hit him all at once: he fell back into recharge and when he rebooted three megacycles later, he was 30K credits richer and alone with a very, very, _very_ angry ninjabot.

A very angry Prowl who had just uncharacteristically slagged a psycho femme to defend his crusty honor, but an angry Prowl nonetheless, who took his sweet time sending him scathing glares and refusing to be talked to.

* * *

A few megacycles spent brooding in his quarters was enough to make the ninjabot wind down, though, possibly only because all that boiling fury threw off his 'chi', or whatever that thing was called. For a 'bot who had nearly been molested but half a solar-cycle earlier, Lockdown was in a rare mood. He was lounging in his navigator's chair, laughing to himself as his partner sat on the floor by the vista with his pet tree, trimming it—or mauling it, as the term stood.

After a klik or two, Lockdown gave air to another indulgent, horribly superior chuckle. He practically heard Prowl's visor narrow; he definitely heard him set down his clippers.

"May I ask what you find so amusing, partner?"

If only vocals could kill. The little bike only used that term when he was feeling either playful or outrageously pissed. Most assuredly the latter. Feeling like he'd already won, Lockdown grinned and leaned back.

"That got you riled," he drawled.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Prowl said coolly, even though the other mech could hear his gears grinding furiously.

"You didn't like seein' that malfunction toppin' me."

"When your _chamber plating_ is forced open, I would have to agree." Prowl said it so sharply that he cut off more of his precious tree than he'd ever intended. Blipping in shock, he fumed at the hacked-off bit and poked and plucked at the greenery to cover the damage, then continued stiffly, "You were exposed and in a ... compromising position. In danger. I merely averted it."

"That the reason you knocked her out like that, after she was already down?"

"How could you have let your guard down like that?" the ninjabot asked suddenly, turning around with his visor reduced to a sliver.

"What're you--I was out cold, I told ya!"

The thing that made his substructure itch was the implication that a one-trick-drone like that could get one over on him. He was just that simple. Yeah, the idea of override tech made him uncomfortable—more uncomfortable than Prowl knew—but he'd still been through worse. He'd always been through worse. Caught in the urge to grumble, Lockdown stopped then settled back again, gap-toothed grin spreading like a stain.

"Or you think I let her do it. 'Cos I wanted a piece."

A pause.

"That get your gears in a grind? Me facin' that skinny-aft little femme, stasis-cuffs and all?"

"I am quite aware of what you are attempting to accomplish," Prowl said snootily, rising to discard the last of his clippings at the back of the bridge. "And I will have you know, I refuse to give you the satisfaction."

"Too bad. 'Cos I got my Spark dead-set on some kind'a satisfaction, and you're gonna serve."

Reaching out as his partner walked by, he took hold of Prowl, who was still harboring a good deal of bitterness, all glaringly obvious with the creaking-scraping show it took to pull the bike within two feet of him. His glee did nothing to relieve the younger mech's 'frag-off-and-deactivate' look, and a servo on his pretty aft earned the musclecar a warning snarl.

"M'just lookin' for a little somethin' to get that glitch outta my system… _darlin'_."

He dropped the name like the bomb it was; to his immensely feisty satisfaction, Prowl's visor went a shade lighter, then dropped to a cloudy teal, thin lips _almost_ pursing. Lockdown gave him a sleazy grin, now rubbing at the kid's servo.

"Idn't that your job, partner? Givin' me a servo when I need it?"

Prowl averted his visor disdainfully. Lockdown leaned forward, red optics waxing mischievous, and nibbled a digit. Prowl jerked and brushed him off, snorting, but something in his face softened—something that, when combined with another expectant I'm-not-going-to-let-you-go-_until_ smirk from the old and horribly patient musclecar, allowed him to give it up and lean into his partner.

Emphasis on _his_.

"To be certain, I am a touch hazy on the conditions of our partnership. Perhaps the contract could be reviewed. A few terms re-written, as per your… evolving expectations…" the young mech said softly, pressing into the old mech's scuffed plating with an even softer pulse of his Spark.

That little energy flare was as good as an on-switch. Sudden heat radiated from each mech's dark, tensed substructure as they came together, nearly brushing helms; Lockdown leaned up like a lion into a caress, motor purring in anticipation of a quick and dirty 'face, or maybe even a _long_ and dirty 'face, but Prowl only used the proximity to reach past him and press a button on the console, booting up the main screen.

"But in a moment," he said with a prim little smile, optics locked calmly with Lockdown's baffled ones. "We have a message."

Lockdown's tattooed facial plating instantly crunched into an unhappy face, but he relented, only making sure to keep his servo around Prowl's waist as a reminder of what he had promised the hot-Sparked hunter. Joke as they may, one term never wavered: business always came first. He leaned back and Prowl accessed the line for him, only huffing a little when Lockdown's servo snuck between his legs and did unmentionable and highly irritating things.

Lockdown quirked an optic ridge when a warning-screen flashed where the comm-ID was supposed to be. Something had scrambled the transmission, either a faulty execution or damaged equipment: the source had gotten lost in the process. It was nothing but a curiosity until the visual feed kicked in, showing the inside of a small, black-detailed vessel, as recorded from the main communication console—both a console and a ship Lockdown knew on sight.

His servo froze on Prowl's cream plating. The two mechs watched, then watched further, for three long cycles—if not for the crackle of static, they would have assumed it a still-frame. There was nothing to see, and nothing to hear except for some strange creaking noises.

Then Prowl jerked as a servo slammed onto the console from below, thick magenta digits flexing helplessly against the cold metal. There was a brief scrap of static, a scrape, a whisper, then silence.

Visor angled, Prowl looked back at his partner, utterly stymied and not the least bit unafraid. The huge mech stared hard at the screen, then gestured at the control board, red optics narrowing. His Spark shrank, energy field gone cold and tight.

"Rewind. Crank it up."

In between the scrape and the static, after the slam of Torque's servo, they heard a single weak, wordless groan. Nothing more. The screen went silent again and it might as well have been a scream—a scream from three solar-cycles ago, followed by coordinates that flashed onto the dead black screen.

She was probably already offline.


	59. Search and Rescue

A/N: You guys make me smile~ I bet you're going to sporfle when you find out what happened. Ah, the good ol' TFA nonsense episodes…that nonetheless have a dark possibility to them.

Lockdown, you're growing up! At this rate it'll only take you till the end of the universe to reach full emotional maturity... but that's why we LOVE you.

* * *

Search and Rescue

* * *

Neither mech spoke of the bounty waiting for them—the one they had traveled to that specific section of the galaxy for—as they changed course, Moot creaking soundlessly in black space as she was forced into a sharp turn.

The coordinates led them directly to her tiny dark ship, which was stranded on a featureless plain on a grey, chilly planet and surrounded by a forest of enormous rocky formations. They approached with all due caution. The ship's door was hanging open, a gaping mouth showing strangely lackluster insides. Trading curt comm-signals, the two hunters entered what would have been a death-trap, had anybody been lying in wait.

In the best-case scenario, they still expected to find the three-wheeler crumpled on the floor right in front of the monitor, perhaps still frozen with her servo atop the console, but there was nothing but a dark stretch of metal. Every pede-step echoed as though the ship was hollow, both mechs peering around in their night-vision—there wasn't a glimmer of light in the whole place.

It surpassed 'quiet' and plunged right on into 'node-numbing silence'. Neither could hear so much as the hum of an active vehicle. Or a Spark.

After braving the bridge, they searched the small ship thoroughly. It was completely empty, energon stores included, which only increased their anxiety. Encountering an enemy, though foreboding, would have given some sort of hint as to her location or fate. The absence of even a magenta-plated shell, no matter how morbid the thought, made Prowl's Spark prickle.

Lockdown, in particular, was in an awful agitation, striding around in the surrounding rocks with booming pede-steps; he finally resorted to calling her name aloud, growing more and more tense as the ancient femme did not appear from the grey maze, smiling as though all of this were a marvelous ploy to get the two crabby hunters to spend some time with her.

Lost, the partners returned to the ship. There looked to be signs of a struggle. A few shelves were knocked askew, their contents scattered; there was a sizeable dent in the control paneling. Prowl bent to inspect a bottle on the ground, knocked on its side and leaking a poisonous-looking brown fluid all over Torque's spotless deck. He ran a quick scan on it, then lifted the bottle up, offering it to Lockdown's suspicious optic.

"What's that?"

"Barnacle retardant, unless I miss my guess."

All 'bots sprayed the standard-issue cocktail of chemicals over their plating before they even so much as attempted to remove space barnacles from a ship's hull. As little as one nub could latch on and take the Transformer over entirely, but the chemical was so caustic that the techno-organic creatures couldn't stand to fuse to their exostructure long enough to hotwire their systems. Lockdown's heavy plating clicked dismissively.

"She was 'probly doin' some clean-up."

Prowl nodded. There was no reason why it wouldn't be on the deck, or anywhere on the ship. The two hunters kept the stuff lying around all the time: it was as common a ship condiment as energon or accelerant. Lockdown glared up at the strangely shady ceiling, inhaling as though sampling the air for anything strange; he looked over his shoulder-plating.

"What're the stats on the ship?"

Prowl went to the old-fashioned monitor and attempted to boot up the ship. It only lasted for a flickering second before shutting down with a mournful, sleepy noise, seeming to settle further into its hollow quiet.

"It is completely drained," Prowl reported, vocals tight.

"She wouldn'ta left it like this," he growled, optics darting towards the monitor, then the door and the snatch of pale white sky and sharp cliffs it framed. "Somethin' happened."

"That much is obvious. What, however?"

The entire planet was swathed in a dead-rock silence, so there was nothing for their hot audios to pick up besides the creak of their own tensors. With such grey everywhere else, they both felt it at the same time; a bloom of warm Spark energy, weak but located a definite length away, starboard to the ship. Both mechs jumped inside their plating, helms snapping towards the open door as a yowling, roaring noise bounced between the towering rocks, crackling as though broadcast from damaged vocalizers.

The two hunters ran outside and stopped at the same time, pedes scratching the rock and sending up plumes of sparks. Torque stood in the rocks ahead of them, barely recognizable for all the space barnacles clotting her magenta plating. The oily, pulsating creatures had webbed her over into a grey-pink mass, even sliding sticky tentacles into her armor chinks; without seeing the two mechs, she stalked into the clearing at a dogged pace, uncovered optic barely lit, mouth stretched open and distorted. Her detail plating shifted and flapped like gills, radiating a ravenous tension. Every so often, a wet eye-like structure on her hip or arm flickered this way and that, marbled with dark veins.

Lockdown took a step back without thinking, core hum crunching to a halt.

"Slag."

"Indeed," Prowl whispered, coolant spreading through his substructure in an icy quiver when the old femme's helm turned toward the noise and saw prey.

There was no time to react. Torque charged them—but where Prowl expected a stagger or a stomp, she went low and pounded against the smooth stone at crashing speed, broadcasting another starving scream that forced Prowl and Lockdown to scramble inside her ship. The door shut with a slam and they bolted it manually just as she crashed into the hull, emitting furious insect clicks and thick static, all underscored with the shrill squeal of the barnacles.

"Goddamned femme! Goddamned, Pit-spawned, motherfraggin' _femme_! You'd think she'd been around long enough to _learn_!"

"No 'bot is infallible," Prowl gasped without processing, actually flinching from his crouch against the main console when Torque started banging and clawing at the door. Lockdown snatched up an empty energon cube from the floor and flung it at the door, where it shattered soundlessly and vaporized.

"Then she should'a been all 'fallible' a billion stellar-cycles ago, when I wasn't on call to bail her out! Stupid-aft downgrade!"

Lockdown fell to cursing the ancient bike so intensely he could hardly move while doing so; Prowl sat back on her tiny navigator's chair and attempted to calm the panicked grind of his mechanics, sorting out his current reality.

Adding up the facts, Torque had been taken over by space barnacles over five solar-cycles ago. Barring how it had happened, the scene they had viewed on the main commscreen made sense now: she had desperately flailed for help as the creatures took her over, keeping control only long enough to log in her coordinates and initiate the call. No time for spoken warnings.

Suddenly, the violent banging stopped. The silence was such that even Lockdown quieted, turning from his pacing to glare at the barricaded door with an uneasy hiss of his hydraulics. Both mechs jerked when a weight slammed onto the top of the ship, rattling it to its girders.

"She moves so quickly," Prowl said, trying not to track the staccato impacts of her pedes as the femme skittered across the top of the ship, stopping only to scratch at seams and snarl. "I was told I could barely function when I was… controlled."

"You got _space barnacles_?" Lockdown demanded, red optics wide. Prowl looked back at him, one ridge arched.

"So there truly is one health complication in this universe you haven't contracted?"

"Only 'cos I got more than two logic bytes to my name, ya downgrade!" the musclecar balked, regarding the bike as though he was suddenly looking at the (albeit very handsome) Cybertronian equivalent of a toaster. "How the holy Pit did _you_ manage to—"

"It is a story both short and embarrassing, that we nonetheless do not have time for," Prowl said tensely, servo out. Torque shifted above them and growled deeply, drawing both red and blue optics to the ceiling. "What are we going to do?"

Prowl's cool vocals were the lightning rod for his partner's thoughts. Reaction was all well and good, as long as action followed in a timely fashion. Lockdown leaned against the wall of the cramped ship, air gusting from his vents.

"They've had her long enough to learn how to work her properly, and that's gonna make things difficult," he grumbled into his claw mod, optics dimmed and narrowed.

"Yes, but how have they energized themselves long enough to do so?" Prowl asked, shaking his head in wonder. "I was only under their control for a few megacycles and it nearly halved my cells. At such an advanced rate of consumption, anyone's energon stores would only last two to three solar-cycles, at most."

Another thump made them look up, but this time Lockdown's optics stuck on the blacked-out lights and the limp wires. The hollow feeling of the ship came back to him, along with the flicker of the monitor. He cursed softly.

"She drained the ship. That's what's kept her online this long."

Prowl refreshed his optics, visor dimming worriedly. Whether or not the ship was sentient, the thought made his center shrink. The femme's Spark, as they had felt it, was weak: her hunger must have been the only thing propelling her to such viciousness. They needed to get to her before she over-shot her energy stores and the barnacles perished.

If only the creatures could be scraped off once a mech or femme were forced to access their emergency cells, it would be simple: but when the barnacles died on a host, the creatures, who now had a complete control over all levels of regulatory controls and systems, sent a termination signal through their host that 'bots rarely survived. They could be scorched off one-by-one, true, but if there were enough barnacles attached and they withered while still hooked into the bot's system… it was a horrible threat but a constant one--one to which bots had become all too desensitized as they scraped the creatures off of their ships' hulls decade after decade.

Torque was so covered there was barely anything left of her facial plating. The risk was high. Separating her from the parasites might even induce a shock so severe it would off-line her. Anything but fast work wasn't an option.

"Burnin's the only way to get 'em off."

Lockdown's gravelly vocals cut into the bike's thoughts. He looked at his partner, who was staring into the shadows, clearly figuring something out. At length, he hissed in frustration.

"I don't got anything that'll generate that kinda heat--that kinda precision. Blowtorch is wired into the ship and y'can't go one by one. Same with your jump-jet boosters. I'd say use the engines… but Moot's too new of a model. Even on low, her thrusters would just turn the gal's plating into slag."

Prowl's visor thinned as he frowned, the buzz of his processor sapping his optics to a dirty teal. He straightened with a brusque beep, turning towards Lockdown.

"What if we use a link-up to reroute some of Moot's emergency energon into Torque's vessel and use the weakened afterburners to sear them off all at once?"

"Sounds good," Lockdown grunted after a moment; a quick flash of his optics was enough to communicate a pride in his partner's sharp logic circuits.

Frowning deeply, the old hunter ground out a few more details in his helm before moving to the half-empty bottle on the floor. He picked it up and hefted it at Prowl, who caught it with a startled blip.

"There's only enough barnacle repellent for one of us. You spray up with the rest of it and go take her down. I want her out: no twitching, no nothing. I'll do the pede-work with the link-up cable. I know my way around her tin-can."

He turned away to study the dark interior once more, but Prowl just looked down at the bottle in his servo, visor dented.

"It is logical, but--" The tiny ninjabot shook his ornate helm, then said quietly, "I tell you now, I do not trust myself to do this."

"Whaddya mean?" Lockdown demanded. Prowl rarely had a failing in self-confidence, and if he did, he didn't usually pick the worst times to have them. He was better trained than that. Lockdown, minimal patience supply drained by the literal astro-train wreck they were in, didn't give his partner time to answer. "Gear up. You can beat that antique with one servo tied behind your back—she really ain't that good. Even if she was, you'd be better."

"It is not a question of skill, Lockdown. I do not trust myself to strike her in the necessary fashion."

"What? She won't even remember it! And even if she would, I guarantee you she's seen worse," the older mech growled, turning around to stare hard at his partner, who only vented air and, with an immovable frown, offered the bottle back to the huge mech.

"Please."

Lockdown nearly snarled as Prowl stood there, waiting for him to swap places—not because it made sense but because he _wanted_ it. Barnacles hijacked every possible resource for locomotion, so the higher functions of cognition and recording were shut down—there was no thinking, no memory, but that didn't seem to matter to his partner. The hesitant blue flicker of Prowl's visor reminded Lockdown once more of the unwieldy softness the young bike fell prey to every decade or three. It still made the hardened mech's substructure knot uncomfortably, especially when this should have been so quick and clean.

But then, the ninjabot's solemn face said it all: it wasn't about what she would or wouldn't remember. It was about Prowl being forced to do it to her. Hurting himself by hurting her.

The bounty hunter's old Spark did awful things to his chamber as he tried not to think about that concept.

Lockdown ground his damaged dentals together, grunting when the door flexed inwards with another audio-splitting shriek, then snorted hot air from his vents.

"Fine. I been waitin' to sock her one for ages. Now's a good a time as any."

After a too-brief instruction on the location of the respective vessels' ports, the two bounty hunters burst out of the door, Lockdown dripping with pungent repellant and Prowl speedily ducking under the ship's support beams like a shadow to sprint to their own carrier.

The opening knocked Torque a few meters away, where she landed on all fours, glaring with her one glittering optic as Lockdown hit the stone floor with a boom, dark liquid coursing down his scratched plating. He creaked down into a defensive position; seeing the hulking cybertronian there, smelling and feeling of the satisfying hum of pink sustenance in his dark inside parts, the loud, furious grind of Torque's motor whined down into something far more predatory. When the possessed femme fell to pacing, baring her dentals, Lockdown twitched two of his digits with an ugly smirk.

"You hungry? Come'n get it, tranny."

* * *

Prowl heard the shriek and the clang as she leapt at the musclecar, nearly knocking his huge partner to the ground, but he didn't turn back to watch. No matter the anxious ripple of his Spark, he had a task. It was only the first of many violent noises that he attempted to block out while sprinting from storage to the main console and then to his partner's room, finally heaving the huge link-up cable from a puddle of wires in the corner of Lockdown's workshop.

He connected it in the proper place at Moot's console, then ran it out, only to see Lockdown roar as the flesh-bulky femme used his fresh-won grip on her to ram her helm into his own with enough force to shatter his optics. His right claw popped free; she clocked him and the last thing Prowl saw was the old femme fastened, dentals and digits, to his partner's neck-wiring, barnacles once more emitting their cacophonous shriek of excitement.

Needless to say, he was nearly sick with uneasiness as he tried to make sense of Torque's old ship. Once he found the port hidden under a floor panel, he connected the two machines and booted the tiny vessel up. When its lights came back on with a groan, Prowl darted back out into the open air again, Spark beating hard; he only made it halfway down the ramp, as Lockdown and Torque were in an indecipherable pile of black plating and rubbery pink-grey flesh at the bottom.

It thankfully straightened out into Lockdown heaving the femme's limp body over his shoulder-plating, but the enormous and disfiguring dent in his tattooed facial plating was still to be questioned.

"What—"

Lockdown shook his helm vehemently, air huffing worrisomely from a dented vent.

"Get your aft back in there and do exactly what I tell you."

Prowl complied. Lockdown gave the bike instructions via commlink: how to keep both the energy exchange and the flame low as he seared the barnacles off of the femme. Lockdown turned her carefully in front of the jets, magenta plating turning black under the gust of heat as withered barnacles fell to the ground with crisp plops. The remaining barnacles all pulsated furiously, making her twitch again and again; trying to forcibly reboot her systems and lead her to fight.

Lockdown's wiry arms were aching from the heat by the time the last pink-grey mound parted from her scorched plating with a squeal; finally, the old femme went truly limp in his servos. Engine growling, the massive musclecar went to one knee and propped her scalding frame against his chassis, blowing air over her plating until she was cool and solid again, hoping the little three-wheeler only felt horribly light because she had just shed 50-some kilos of parasitic organic weight.

He hailed Prowl and his partner killed the engines, emerging from the ship with his servos clenched at his side, visor dented anxiously.

Lockdown looked up after a long cycle with his servo on her chamber, then nodded. Prowl visibly relaxed, one servo to his ornate helmet as he blipped tiredly. Blackened plating, bone-dry energy cells and all, her Spark still pulsed on.

* * *

Two solar-cycles later, Prowl came in to check on the still-motionless femme. Lockdown, more a medic than Prowl had ever suspected, manually cleared Torque's jumbled relays and set up an emergency energon siphon; five cubes of high-grade had disappeared into her fragile-looking frame and still she had not stirred from the berth.

If Lockdown was the medic, Prowl was obviously the attendant. Although much time had been spent simply sitting with her in her tiny quarters, the bike had managed to get most of the scorch-marks off of her plating in the time she had been in emergency stasis. He had no doubt the aesthetically sensitive femme would appreciate the kindness, but as every scrub uncovered more of the forsaken racing stripes, he began to prefer the patchy black.

Nonetheless, two solar-cycles seemed long for any recovery. After checking her stats from the read-out at the side of her berth for the fiftieth time, Prowl frowned heavily. The fluctuation he thought he had sensed was nothing but wishful processing, and so he turned to go.

He didn't get far: something fastened on his thruster and he was yanked down, hitting the berth with a stunned clang. The bike almost struggled, just from instinct, but then a brightly-plated arm fastened around his middle and Torque pressed him weakly to her black-smeared front.

"T-torque?"

"Hush," she muttered in his audio, vocals painfully gravelly. "I needed a hug and didn't feel like asking. Or getting up."

Prowl smiled slightly, half from relief and half from puzzlement. His own Spark swelled as he finally found the delicate pulse of her own against his tank, too shy yet to reach behind her crispy plating.

"Are you… alright?"

"Still intact. Not the first time it's happened," she said in an utterly bored voice, wrapping him closer and nosing into his neck-cables.

"I am sorry to hear that."

He touched her arm hesitantly, then retreated to a ginger pat of her servo. She didn't react. She emitted a steady, blank hum, and while he was ready to share her grief, her apparent unconcern for the seven solar-cycle gap in her priceless existence unnerved the ninjabot more than he cared to say. Prowl shifted uncomfortably, too aware of his clanking armor and the fact he couldn't see her facial plating.

"We should… tell Lockdown that you are online."

"Comm him if you want. He's seen me come out of worse states than this and not done so much as twitch."

She spoke in the same dead-pan as before. He had no doubt she was exhausted, mentally and physically, but this bordered on raw apathy—cynicism most unfitting of the bright femme. He frowned, running his digits gingerly over her forearm. She made an unhappy noise behind him.

"He was terrified, you know," Prowl ventured after a bit of silence. She snorted immediately.

"I don't believe he was programmed with that emotion. He has a stopcock at 'mildly concerned but still unwilling to budge his aft'."

"No, he was. As was I." Moved by her biting tone, Prowl actually reached for her servo, half-twining their digits before murmuring, "I would not lie to you."

She made no response. They lay together for long cycles in the dark room. Tuned to her now, he could feel her Spark struggling to expand as though hemmed in by some dense melancholy. Finally, he had to speak.

"Is something the matter?"

Besides, of course, the extremely traumatic experience of being taken over by space barnacles—Prowl had experienced it himself and knew. Regardless of whether the actual memories were gone, the feeling they left—along with the gap itself--was horrible. But she understood and simply sighed.

"I'm lonely, Prowl," she said softly, shaking her helm. "I stop paying attention to things when I'm lonely. Lose any will of self-preservation. I might as well have scooped up those barnacles and arranged them on my chassis. I've just… I've been so helpless. Lost a job because of it."

Prowl knew. It was not lost on him how deep her loneliness could be, nor how vulnerable she was to it. Equally so, he knew this was not something he could offer apologies for: it simply was. No words could change it. He continued to hold her servo until she took a shuddering intake behind him, then realized there was one thing he could offer the listless femme.

"Would you care to come stay with us for a time?" he asked gently. "I'm certain Lockdown would not object."

Rather, if the old bounty hunter did object, he would not be heeded. After nearly two centuries, Prowl knew his pull. A look was all it would take; a firm utterance of his partner's name if Lockdown was feeling rebellious.

"No, I'll give you two your alone-time." He almost felt her smile behind him, but it was short-lived. "Besides, I hate recharging on that damn chair. It gives me kinks. Dents my struts."

Prowl's visor dimmed, at a loss. He couldn't imagine her simply flying off and returning to the crushingly lonely depths of space without having properly healed—but right when he began to have an idea of what to say next, Torque gave him a little nudge on the top of his tank.

"Then again, I could be persuaded if I had a berth," she croaked almost playfully. "Perhaps I could share yours?"

"Oh. Ah," the bike said intelligently, suddenly struck with the urge to twiddle his digits. "_Well_."

"Kidding, darling."

"I would not object," he said shyly, once he was sure he meant it.

"Yes, but then Lockdown would come barging in every half-megacycle, just to make sure I wasn't having my way with you," she groaned, tone both amused and long-suffering as she rubbed at a bit of black on her other servo.

"Perhaps he could join us as well," Prowl suggested all-too-lightly, obviously at the end of his 'coy' tether but still enjoying the chance to be ridiculous and daring, if just to make her smile. He was surprised at himself, and pleasure joined it when the old femme chuckled and gave him a squeeze.

"Don't speak so, Prowler, you get an old she-bot riled."

Her hum changed, becoming deeper and a little bit more content. Prowl, attuned as he was to electromechanical rhythms, felt the change as strongly as physical touch and knew she would be alright. They lay silent for a bit longer, Prowl gifting the other bike with the luxury of simple physical connection to stoke her center to a steady glow before she had to return to an empty ship, then gently rose from the berth.

Torque smiled and grasped for his servo as he turned to go, sculpted mouth sweet with a true smile.

"You're precious, love. Thank you."

He smiled and nodded at her, and turned again, but the femme didn't let go.

"Wait, wait—before you leave me all alone." Prowl nearly opened his mouth to protest, but Torque only looked at him miserably. "Please tell me I didn't give you too much of a run."

"You nearly smashed Lockdown's face in," Prowl offered helpfully once he realized what she was referring to: the epic battle where she had to be subdued. Torque's optics went wide.

"With… what?"

"Yours."

"My what?"

"Your face."

So _that_ was why her facial plating felt horribly loose. She winced.

"Ooh. Lovely." Torque picked herself up from her berth with a wrenching creak, reaching down to pop the energon siphon out of her exposed fuel line with a grim expression. "Best get my hellos over with now, then, before he has another solar-cycle to stew on it and decides he never wants to see me again."

"The most advisable course, in my opinion."

* * *

"You're an idiot."

"Glad to see you in one piece too, darling," Torque said blandly, arms crossed without any definite defiance as she stood beside her barely-lit console. Lockdown loomed over the tiny femme, helm nearly scraping the ceiling, red optics ablaze.

"How long've you been around and you _still_ ain't sharp enough to load up proper before scrapin' barnacles? If you're that fraggin' stupid, I should'a let you offline with those things all over you. Would'a been doin' the galaxy a favor! To the _Pit_, you fraggin'—we had a job lined up!"

"Lockdown," Prowl said, optics locked tensely on his partner; Torque waved the other bike off.

"Go ahead," she said gloomily. "I believe I've earned this one."

Lockdown glared at her in a way that snarled that she certainly _had_, then made a curt gesture at his partner.

"Go get the ship booted up," he snapped.

Prowl raised a servo, almost reluctant to leave them alone as he knew how Torque was feeling at the moment, but she nodded slightly at him, so he returned it and left.

Whether or not Lockdown had been saving face in front of Prowl was questionable, but once the bike was gone, it was a full invitation to let loose on the three-wheeler. Lockdown yelled himself sore at her for a good while, using swear-words even she wasn't familiar with, then stopped suddenly. After that, he was content, apparently, to just glare at her and let her steep in her own pathetic, idiotic, Primus-forsaken fluids.

She weathered all of it with half-lit optics and a sullen expression, then sighed when she was sure he wouldn't get a second wind.

"I'll be on by way, then," she said dully, moving to the console to boot up her ship. "Thank you for playing rescue and loaning me some energon. I'm sorry for troubling you."

Lockdown watched her with narrowed optics, the threatening growl of his engine still hard at work communicating his utter loathing of her. But as the silence stretched on, filled only with the tick-taps of her thick magenta digits on the keyboard and the blips of the exhausted ship, the old musclecar ground his dentals; his optics wandered around the ship. Finally, he snorted uncomfortably.

"Y'don't wanna…"

"'Yuh don't wanna' what?" she mocked him irritably, glowering at her screen as she rerouted the emergency energon stores to get her just far enough to where she could seek repairs. This was a fairly deserted sector, so it would take her a while…

"Y'know. Stay." Lockdown's vocals came from behind her, gruff and halting. "On the ship."

Torque stopped. Refreshed her optics. Refreshed her _processor_.

"…Until?"

"'Till you can pick your bottom lip component off the fraggin' floor," he growled, like it was the last thing in this universe he wanted to say but it still managed to worm its way out.

Torque stood motionless at her ship's console, staring at the read-outs, then smiled at nothing in particular.

After all this time, he paid attention. He knew why she did it. Knew she wasn't really an idiot: she just got lonely and turned into one.

And he… offered to help.

Her Spark swelled, picking up a steady rhythm for the first time in months. Her scorch-marked plating might as well have glowed three shades brighter, such was the warmth brewing beneath it. Putting her ship into stasis with a short keyboard command, Torque turned toward Lockdown with a grin and holstered a servo on her broad hip.

"You know what? I think I will."

The musclecar didn't know whether to look relieved or pissed off, but either way it found them preparing the tow-cables between their ships with a healthy silence between the two old 'bots. Torque's step gained speed and energy as they went, marveling over the changed mech working (quite grumpily) beside her. In the middle of tying off a secondary restraint, she looked up at him with a feline smile, then started suddenly:

"This should be very pleasant. Prowl's offered me his berth, you know."

"Fine. I've got room on mine for him."

Lockdown shot her a look, then went on with securing the last of the lines. He was discomfited that she'd mentioned it at all: she knew it was a stretch for him, in the first place, so he didn't know why she was pushing it.

Apparently Lockdown's definition of 'pushing it' needed an update.

"Oh no—this is a package-deal. I get the berth with him still in it."

"Y'don—no. What?"

"Oh, I do believe so," she said, a maddening bounce in her vocals—obviously being silly for the sake of being silly. "We're going to have a wonderful time."

"You can have my berth," Lockdown grunted after a minute, feeling discomfort rise like oil under his plating as he avoided her optics.

"Why I wouldn't dream of depriving you, love. Prowl and I will be nice and cozy, and I'll make sure to lock the door so we both feel safe—"

"If I hear anything, I'll knock that door down," the musclecar half-hissed, giving her a baleful look that she hardly acknowledged.

"Oh _darling_, it needn't be so exclusionary!" She tsked, then gave him a lidded glance and a curling smile, purring, "After a few cubes I'm sure he'll let you watch."

"_You_—"

Lockdown almost grabbed for her and almost got her besides that. Torque skittered up Moot's plank before he could stop her, grabbing the emerging Prowl around the waist and giving him a big, noisy kiss on the mouth. Prowl, aft-patted and abandoned the next moment, gave his partner a look so utterly bewildered that Lockdown couldn't help but relax and snort in some vague, prickly form of amusement.

If the antique tried anything, he was pretty damn sure Prowl would come crawling, keening and fretting all the way, over to his berth to beg protection. He had nothing to worry about… and she needed this. Even if he had to deal with an unbearably chipper femme for the next few solar-cycles, he'd try and give her what she needed.

Because that's… what friends did, or so he'd heard.


	60. Power of Thought

A/N: And then Prowl proceeds to do what every good (intergalactic bounty-hunting) wife does. TAME TAME TAME THE SPOUSE! (Otherwise, 60 chapters. Wow. I need a hobby. As a celebration of said chapter-number, there will be a smut chapter after this one. …Sometime. After I finish it. Promise. It's absolutely kinktastic and mildly horrific, though, so watch yerself.)

Also, this sad author wants to formally apologize, 30 chapters too late, for bein' a story-dick.

Specifically, for being a story-dick concerning Torque. I was so focused on using her as a character-tool to progress a story that's QUITE difficult to progress (two isolated and emotionally-retarded bounty hunters, completely stranded from most/all canon settings and characters? Yeahhhh) that I didn't look up long enough to realize she was a) tragically overreaching her OC slot and trying to fill a main character slot and b) MarySue-ing it up pretty hard-core at the end, and it absolutely kills me to think how many readers I alienated because of it.

I dicked up. Bad. Ironically and conveniently, this marks Torque's general exit from both stories…. but all the same, I'm really sorry, guys. Seriously. WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE. I DON'T UNDERSTAND.

I hope you can see that I had clean intentions. I wanted her to be a dynamic revealer for Prowl and Lockdown's growth/relationship (which occurs in a frikkin' black hole of a world) and a spring-board for greater things along with being her own hopefully-amusing and developed person, but I'm honestly surprised you're still reading if you're a canon-character-buff. I know that there are some that like her, but there are also some that want to kill her with acid. Thanks to the people who had the guts to tell me I was abusing my privileges!

This (**stupidly** long) story only has 6-something more chapters to go, anyway, so start counting down, loves. The end is niiiiigh.

Well. The happy end. I won't talk about the other end. Not until it's actually here.

* * *

Power of Thought

* * *

One of a billion lightless 'solar-cycles' of deep-space transit found Lockdown slumping, motionless, in his giant navigator's chair, having exhausted his list of available distractions megacycles ago.

He had run out of knick-knacks to repair; Prowl was sequestered in his little (locked) Zen hotbox again, wanting nothing to do with his obnoxiously hot-Sparked and bored partner; for Primus' sake, the hull was even clean of space barnacles. It was just him and the tiny ship, creaking onwards through depthless black space. On. And on. And on.

Lockdown was soon reduced to scanning the Feed out of nothing more than boredom and a deathless desire for shiny and lethal objects. Shiny, lethal, _expensive_ objects, due to his meticulous taste in firearms, but there was something about a gun that told a 'bot, in horrifying platinum detail, what it was going to do to them before it did it… Primus, but he loved the look on their face-plates.

It was like anticipation. Only. You know. For death.

Grinning, the old mech leaned back and read through the description on another such Self-Explanatory Weapon of Death for the second time, liking the way the energy cells lit up with that poisonous yellow-green before the canon was fired in the demo-file. That would get 'em running. Decision more of a reflex than anything--because he liked what he liked and what he liked, he got--Lockdown craned forward far enough to cue up a transaction and enter in the appropriate amount, greedy smirk growing.

He had it all lined up, digit above the 'Send' command, when--

"Do you truly need that?"

Lockdown jumped despite himself, reflexively turning his chair a bit even as he knew that Prowl would be standing behind him, arms crossed daintily. He cursed his partner's ceaseless stealth. Couldn't the brat just knock his pedes around for once, warn a 'bot a few kliks in advance? Did he have to ninja around _everywhere_?

"Whaddya mean?" he growled over his spiked shoulder, tearing his optics from the gun on-screen.

Behind him, Prowl joined him in studying the weapon a moment longer, watching it glisten and rotate in the demo-file, then turned his optics to his partner. Some invisible judgment passed over Lockdown's helm as a millimeter was shaved off of the bike's exacting visor, then Prowl sighed.

"Nothing. Just a thought."

With that, the tiny bike turned and walked away, pedesteps still _stupidly_ inaudible. Lockdown glared after him, white brow arched, then shook off the strange exchange and pressed Send.

Prowl was getting increasingly strange about money. It wasn't so much about the debt anymore, because they'd settled that score in the first fifty or so stellar-cycles with some really good jobs, but ever since then, the two bounty hunters had been watching their purchases out of habit. Or Prowl still was, when he even made purchases (usually confined to organic coolant and the occasional datapad file for his collection). Lockdown had gotten used to the idea of having money far, far quicker, and generally forgot their intense poverty as old mechs, used to dry and wet spells, were wont to do.

So it wasn't the debt—and it wasn't the first time something like that had happened, either.

In fact, whenever Lockdown brought home something shiny and ultimately unnecessary or bought it from any one of hundreds of shady markets, Prowl fixed him with a not-quite-glare and radiated a mixture of exasperation and contempt absurdly potent for a bike his size. It left Lockdown feeling as though whatever was in his servos was dirty and he should put it down, or return it, because if he brought the dirty thing on-board, his designation was mud as far as Prowl was concerned. Every time he did it on-shore with Prowl in tow, his prim little panther's disapproval was tangible and every step toward the purchase counter was an extra knot to his wiring noose. He would be getting no action that night, regardless of the excuse used.

Needless to say, after a month or two he was ready to strangle Prowl. More aggravating than the fact he was actually _attentive_ enough to notice such non-explicit signs, the old mech despised the mess even moreso when Prowl simply refused to vocalize his disapproval, settling for a bland comment and a retreat when provoked. As intense as Lockdown's disregard was for the opinions of others, it took a while, but his formidable ability to ignore all of Prowl's nonverbal complaints was finally exhausted one solar-cycle--unfortunately when they happened to be in the middle of one of the afore-mentioned markets.

Lockdown also happened to have the massive stun-gun in his servo, which made it a hundred times more jarring when he whipped around in response to the _third_ tsking noise of the megacycle and roared:

"What's yer goddamn problem?!"

Customers of all shapes and sized tensed around the two dark-plated 'bots, unknowing of what their relationship was or if violence was coming. All were completely unaware that they were about to play witness to sentient autonomous robots three times their size arguing like a married couple. One small organic bolted out of the store from fear alone, knocking over a stand of B-scale harpoons on the way out--mere toothpicks to the mechs towering above most of the store, currently locking optics.

Immediately, Lockdown knew he should have known better. Prowl made him feel like an mother-fragging downgrade by just gazing up at him and arching his optic ridge, expression calm and appraising in the face of both his outburst and the brutal-looking stunner hovering inches from his elegant facial plating.

"I am of the opinion that you are becoming too frivolous with your expenses," he stated, servo on his hip. "It is time you begin to manage your credits more responsibly."

A few kliks passed in utter silence, broken only by the flustered twitches of Lockdown's scratched plating and a blip of widened optics. At length, they narrowed into disbelieving slits.

"It's _my money_," Lockdown growled slowly, hardly believing that he _had to say it_. His grip on the trigger twitched involuntarily. Prowl simply looked up at his cantankerous partner for another moment, visor thinning with dangerous subtlety, then made a vague gesture.

"Just a thought."

Lockdown watched the little bike walk off down the rack of canons to correct the harpoons that had been knocked over, then glared at the gun in his servos, snarl turning into a vengeful leer.

That time, he definitely bought it to spite Prowl.

* * *

The battle continued.

At first, his counter-attack was a little bit of 'doing it just to spite your arrogant aft' business, but after Lockdown woke up to the stupidity of making a 10,000-plus-credit impulse-buy for the sake of winning a nonexistent argument, he also realized that, for some strange reason, he didn't want it so much if Prowl disapproved. He refused to think that 'guilty' was the right word, but whatever it was, it came on full-force with just a sigh and a look from Prowl—all when he'd done nothing _wrong_ and it was from his account!

"And what will happen if you over-stretch your resources?"

"I'll fix it," Lockdown grunted over his shoulder as he buffed the new addition to his arsenal, now thoroughly wishing that his partner had just left it subliminal instead of badgering him with obnoxious questions he already knew the answer to. Prowl, perched on a small work-bench in the lotus position, shook his helm slightly as though he didn't believe it. Lockdown growled in response, checking the urge to glare back at him.

He'd functioned this long. Never had a situation so bad he hadn't been able to conquer it. His ability to solve problems off-the-cuff was the thing he prided himself on most and that wasn't about to go away as long as he had energon enough to function. Of course, with Prowl with him… it was different, after these two centuries with the ninjabot. He cared a little more about himself, strangely enough. Wanted to avoid those _worse_ times, if just for Prowl.

"But I will feel obliged to loan you an adequate-enough sum to restore your financial state."

"That's your malfunction, now ain't it?" Lockdown said nastily, and Prowl left it at that.

The next few solar-cycles, all was quiet. Prowl restrained himself to crossed arms at the next impulse-buy, having apparently abandoned his partner to his firearm addiction. As long as his partner dropped it, Lockdown considered himself both content and unchanged… but in the absence of the ninjabot's small huffs, he began to pay attention.

Slowly but surely, every other-other time then every other time, the old mech started thinking twice about purchases. He compared his current arsenal with the weapon he was eying, figuring in price and service. It took a stellar-cycle or two, but one mundane solar-cycle, Lockdown was surfing the Feed and looked at a gun for little more than a cycle, then made a disappointed noise and shut down the monitor.

"It was an impressive piece."

Lockdown didn't bother jumping at Prowl's quiet vocals, nor his assumed ninja-ing. He just shrugged, stretching his tensors with a great scrape of metal.

"Don't need it," he groaned, heaving himself up with an uncomfortable grinding sound. Unseen, Prowl smiled in what could only be described as pride, then followed his partner into his quarters, climbing atop Lockdown's chassis without a word. Lockdown submitted to the ritual techno-chi adjustment, similarly silent, and was inches from slipping into his ritual recharge-nap when Prowl made a faint sound above him. Lockdown's engine woofed sleepily.

"Your sigil."

"What about it?" he asked, not even onlining his optics.

"It is scuffed." Lockdown grunted like he'd been told that space was black and mighty cold. Prowl cocked his helm and drew a digit over the scratched surface, murmuring pensively, "It would look much better completely blacked out."

"Who're you, my personal mechanic?"

"Just…a thought."

Lockdown's optics onlined sharply, and the small, confident smile on his partner's face only brought his restored innards to a crunching halt.


	61. Criminal

A/N: Oh, Primus. Outer conflict. String-tying. Canon characters. What is—I don't even. What. WHAT THIS ISN'T MY STYLE.

I think I promised this chapter, like, forty chapters ago? Go me. Also, the transition snippet is relevant. Promise. Also-also, the 'ancient poetry' mentioned is a Taoist sentiment, which I'm pretty sure there'd be a Cybertronian/Cyberninja equivalent of.

* * *

Criminal

* * *

Shock-stick lowered at his side, Prowl rounded another corner, night-vision turning the strangely smooth tunnels into frozen green-lit intestinal tracts. Ironic, as the same tunnels had been eaten out of the carbon-based rock by primitive worms long-extinct… or so was the theory his datapad had been able to find. The ninjabot frowned at the empty stretch ahead of him, expert electricity fields once more fretting outwards in vain: he detested dead areas unless he was meditating. Otherwise, without a current in the air, one of his most important senses was cut off.

When Lockdown hailed him, he didn't pause in his silent trek into the planet's depths; Prowl put a digit to his audio unit, cocking his helm.

_Y'got anything?_

_Negative._

There was a pause and a scrape from miles away, all of which was black stone; Prowl's processor instantly supplied a natural video-clip of Lockdown shifting, a disgruntled look on his white facial plating.

_Damn, you must be deep. Can barely get your signal._

_Our target seems to have had quite some time to cloister himself here_, Prowl rationalized curtly, dividing his attentions between speaking and mapping out his current path: it would hardly do to find the spy then be incapable of navigating back out again. _Were I being sought by two sides, I would think that deeper was the better option._

There was no response: or the abrupt, mangled sound he heard was Lockdown grunting before he ended the call. Silently, Prowl ran the numbers: four 'check-ups' in two megacycles. His partner was almost on edge. He _was_ confined to the upper level of the natural labyrinth in case their target slipped past Prowl and tried to escape to the surface, and the old musclecar hated to be confined in any way, but that only doubled the ninjabot's commitment to ending this chase quickly.

Prowl glared around the absolutely silent tunnel for the fifth time, unable to convince his substructure to fully relax. He was unable to ignore the weight of the stone above and to all sides of him, but it wasn't the tunnels or the target making his plating contract: it was the fact that both factors were firmly entrenched in Autobot territory, along with himself and his partner.

It wasn't the first time it had happened, granted, and they had ventured even further before for a particularly desirable bounty. After the war, the Autobots had expanded their supervision: they made several treaties with neighboring planets that were suitable for energy-harvesting and had a trade system going within a matter of decades. Energon sources had always been a tender spot for their race, no matter the faction, and the victorious Autobots were naturally ensuring their domination and security on the matter. Wanderers like he and Lockdown didn't mind: it made inflation go down and energon was simply easier to find once there was some kind of regulatory system in place.

This particular target was himself an Autobot, who had been contracted for illegal information retrieval at Metroplex and then went rogue. It was uncertain whether he escaped without the Elites themselves learning of his treachery—or his obvious regret at daring to hack their systems for a fee—but he had retreated to an uninhabited planet to escape whoever did choose to pursue him. His former-contractor would emerge the more determined of the two: he desired the mech enough to pay the two bounty-hunters for a timely capture, and a timely capture he would receive.

Two megacycles in and dozens of identical tunnels deep, Prowl halted mid-step.

Reflexively, his mechanics quieted. It was faint, but—out of the immovable stillness that was the black-enameled tunnels, he registered vibrations on the very outermost layer of his plating. Those vibrations, with a few soundless pede-steps of vantage, morphed into vocals. Not communication-functions, but Cybertronian vocals.

Without truly needing to, he checked the energy tag. No, it wasn't their 'bot, but it meant there were other 'bots involved. Three, to be exact, and most likely fellow bounty hunters or Metroplex grunts. They made plans (loud plans that Prowl might have heard in detail, if only the tunnels hadn't mangled the unrecognizable vocals with echoes) to continue searching.

There were yet others, and they were looking for _their_ target. Prowl frowned. He wouldn't notify Lockdown unless it became necessary, but this was growing more complicated. Prowl disliked competition and equally disliked how Lockdown behaved when there was a competing party: namely, disabling them so they couldn't get to his bounty first.

Unfortunately, as he worked out the logistics of avoiding the search-party in such a narrow arena, there didn't seem to be an option other than disabling them. Prowl's frown deepened, engine whining uneasily. His only solace was that his version of the act was far gentler than Lockdown's.

The 'bots split up, pedesteps notably heavy: as they all had some sort of headlight, all were most assuredly four-wheelers. Deprived even of night-vision, as it made a signature hum, Prowl crept forward and lured the first nearby 'bot down a tunnel or two with tiny noises. The dense mech challenged the darkness once, then only clanged forward with various frustrated noises as Prowl ducked under and around the yellowish circles of headlight, leading him deeper and deeper.

The ninjabot found an adjoining path and looped around as soon as he could, hovering at the hulking mech's back for only a klik—perhaps his target felt the shadow aspirating down his neck-struts and began to turn—then reached up and struck him hard across the helm, sending all 200 kilos of him crashing to the floor without so much as a yelp.

The sound echoed horrifically and continued banging on down the tunnels, underscored with the wheeze of the 'bots systems shutting down. Once he was flat-lining, Prowl rebooted his night-vision and nearly gasped, internal temperature dropping ten degrees. The burly blue mech sprawled on the floor next to his dead energy-lance needed no designation, but his comm-line went live with a chirp. The caller's rich vocals were tinny, thinned by distance.

"Sentinel? Sentinel, just audioed somethin' down your way. Give us a clear or we're comin' in."

Prowl stumbled away, servo immediately clanging to the blank spot on the front of his scratched chest-plate. The bounty vanished from his processor: there was only a brief muttering on the other side of the comm-link and a curse, then the sound of pede-steps far down the hall. The ninjabot froze for one klik too long before turning and running, unable to process or keep his own retreat quiet on the hard stone with his Spark in a viciously cold ball.

_Autobots_, he sent to Lockdown, stunned at the level of fear and distance vibrating behind his low vocals. _Autobots, here_.

There was no response but a horribly sudden transformation noise ("We got a comm-signal up ahead—") and a squeal of tires from behind him; vents nearly snapping shut, Prowl transformed instinctively and roared off down a random tunnel, comming his partner again and again. The desperate signals bounced off the hard stone walls and only built the crushing panic in his chassis as yellow light caught the last of his tire as he rounded a corner.

"We've got him! 'Hide, he's comin' your way, round him up from the opposite tunnel!"

Prowl's visual field went from black to blinding yellow in one hard instant, and the impact of slamming into a red mech twice his size was far from the last thing he felt, but it didn't matter. Within several violent cycles, his arms were locked behind his tank and his comm-line was still dead, telling nothing of the identical stasis-cuffs his partner was being forced into a mile away.

* * *

_Twenty stellar-cycles ago, something whirred up—gently, gently—inside of his toy-like frame and his big optics finally lit with an off-key tone. For a moment, all was quiet and blue and timed by careful pulsations. Then he spoke._

_"__Why?"_

_Nothing more than a staticky rasp: the delicate components of vocal function were nearly impossible to repair. Not when crushed to pieces by a claw as big as his chamber. The sound of his aspirations, long and shaky and thick, were enough to send tremors down the struts of the old mech standing beside him._

_"__Why did you—d-do this?"_

_He moved to touch the small mech on the medical berth; the awkward pause before contact with the (intact) white plating spoke of the unnatural nature of the urge. His flat facial plating was slack with the megacycles the tiny 'bot had lain silent and sparking, aging him centuries in that short span._

"_I could not—how could I allow you--" _

_Looking at his crushed spawn, the old mech's deep vocals were almost tender, for the first time since the tiny four-wheeler was Sparked._

_The small mech seemed neither to feel nor see the motion. His rounded helm was cocked to the side, forced forward several degrees by the metal brace lying heavy and ugly around his torso and chamber, bolted into his very plating. Wires poured from both sides of it, snaking from his half-exposed chamber and past the web of support struts. Chrome bars crossed several vital transformation seams. _

_He was trapped in his spindly bipedal mode, though his Guardian couldn't find the words to tell him with his optics already retreating into a blank cornflower blue. _

"_I was supposed to offline. Why didn't you l-let me offline?" _

_The older mech gripped his Ward's plating harder, grounding him by true touch. Already, with every byte of sensory feedback, the young—too young—bot was waking to the broken state of his white frame; the tube rammed down his intake valve; the way his chamber was constructed of cracks held together by bolts after the monster had shattered it in his fist. He felt it, surely. He felt that he would never be able to function like he had, never be able to merge with another living Spark, and he did not want to continue. _

_Before Tinus was able to swear that he would do everything in his power to help the small, destroyed soul on the oversized medical berth, his ward took another hollow, hissing intake._

"_I don't want to function without him," he whispered to himself, something winding down deep inside of him and retreating into a dull, fatal hum. "I can't function without him."_

_As though programmed, Tinus' grip on the tiny mech's arm disengaged. _

_He couldn't touch the youngling then, for fear of indulging him: ending the quivering, pathetic function that he had poured so many hundreds of thousands of credits into, so much unconditional concern. All destroyed by blank optics, unseeing of the mech who gave him life twice. Blue optics stormy, the Elite agent clenched his massive fists and signed off on the wake tablet, slamming it onto the berthside and hating how the tiny 'bot didn't even flinch._

_"Your wants are less my concern than your electropulse, Anicon. You were salvageable and I salvaged you. Whatever is left will have to suffice for our needs and the needs of the Ministry. You have work to do."_

_Anicon off-lined his optics and his audios, feeling only the vibrations of his Guardian's cold retreat through the shivering fragments of his ruined chamber, and tried to die._

* * *

"Look who's back from the Well."

Prowl sat in the chair, motionless, and simply felt the strict internal hum of every mech in the room: the mere vibration was as foreboding as the bright blue optics locked on his bowed helm. It threatened to rattle his black plating off of his substructure, expose his ugly twisted innards. The ninjabot's servos twitched in the low-level stasis-cuffs when the handsome Elite sportscar took a step closer to him, form reduced to a clean white paint-job and trim pedes in his fear-spotty visual feed.

"I jus'… damn, I can't even verify my optic feed."

His voice was rich as ever, awe creeping in and making Prowl's plating contract for reasons unknown. There was a light scrape as he leaned against the nearby table; it was gunmetal grey, like everything else in the room. Interrogation chamber. Air whooshed through Jazz's vents, creating a crisp whistle.

"Went in for a traitor and found a ghost."

If possible, Prowl's helm went lower, almost as though he had been struck in the chamber.

"He's both," Sentinel barked to their right, innards grinding loudly: the lingering pain and system-confusion of being forcibly knocked out and shut down was audible. So was his rage. Prowl shuttered his optics. "He almost made us lose the spy: you should lock him up without trial!"

There was a wheeze of gears; a clipped gesture from Jazz.

"You g'on and get out. Ring up Magnus and bring 'im here when I give you the go-ahead, but not a nanoklik a'fore."

Black as his visual feed was, Prowl felt the tension spike between them, ugly and stark. He heard Sentinel's big servos clench. After what must have been a cycle of locked blue optics and a blue visor, the tension finally crested with a low grunt and a heavy march out of the room, Sentinel's plow-plating clanging into the side of the door. Prowl stayed perfectly still until mechanics creaked close-by.

He unshuttered his optics and Jazz was standing right in front of him: kind, steady Jazz, who had learned more from Yoketron than he ever had the chance to. Perhaps a kindred Spark, without all those hard stellar-cycles between them: or the implied fact that Prowl had gone offline three centuries ago in a battle he never had the Spark to fight. And now, all he could manage was a slow decay borne from fear too strong to process.

"Y'remember me, Prowl?"

Prowl nodded, a bare tilt of his helm. Mechanical.

"Good. That means y'got at least that much'a y'self left," Jazz murmured to the side, one big servo cupped around his audio.

Prowl didn't understand what that meant (or why it could be said in front of him), but the larger question freezing his very insides was why they weren't just sentencing him right here, for his abandonment and crimes afterward. He was a traitor. He knew it: his whole body must have vibrated with it, radiating terror in the realm of an enemy he had never desired but had earned by his actions.

This wary, mindful treatment didn't at all make sense; it made even less sense when Jazz crouched down in front of him with a creak of tensors, all handsome white plating and long face.

There was a deep scar down the front of his red- and blue-striped chassis, cutting right through his Autobot sigil. Too deep to fix without a full plating-transplant. A matching one crossed his facial-plating. Nonetheless, his visor was still aqua and clear. Hopeful.

"I'm gonna ask you a few questions, Prowl. That a'right?"

Prowl simply stared ahead and a little to the left of Jazz, a caged-animal buzz radiating from his tiny black frame. The older ninjabot took a slow intake; the bike was sure Jazz would have touched him, in any other circumstance. It was simply his way. But the sharp gold armor stopped him; the stillness and all of his crimes stopped him.

"Where've y'been all these stella-cycles?" Jazz asked him, slow and steady, with his helm tilted. When the bike didn't answer, he vented and leaned onto his knee-joints. "Y'got any idea why you were with that bounty hunter?"

Prowl's Spark spasmed, sharp and bright: it was the first hard thing he had felt since the flat, dull horror of being taken into the ship's interrogation room. The odd phrasing did not reach him. There was always the hope they had not found Lockdown on the planet, but now he was in custody as well. Of course they would have captured him. It was the only answer.

The ninjabot looked up, visor burning a strident electric blue.

"Where is he?" he demanded.

"S'alright, he's locked up."

The Elite said it like it was a relief—like there was a certain freedom, perhaps a freedom of speech, that should come from having his partner in chains. Prowl couldn't process much beyond that image, nor the fact he couldn't _feel_ Lockdown through so many layers of metal ship. Nonetheless, a twisted, selfish kind of relief—he could at least touch the musclecar once more before it all ended--gave life to his vocalizer.

"I want no luxuries save this: lock me up with him." Before Jazz could speak, Prowl plunged on, vocals harsh and low. "If you are to interrogate me, you will do so after I have seen him and then return me to his cell. I will not be separated from him."

Jazz's facial plating contracted. He directed a wary look at the floor of the ship, then looked back to Prowl, who now placed the tone he was using as that which would be best utilized with a perplexed protoform.

"Now why would'ja wanna be cooped up with that 'bot, Prowl?"

Prowl fought the urge to jerk at his cuffs, panic-coolant rushing through his lines again. He refreshed his vocals, then bent as if trying to keep the clean, delusional Autobot from actually seeing him speak the words.

"Partners are generally expected to keep by each other."

"That 'bot doesn't take partners, he takes prisoners!" Jazz exclaimed softly. He looked at the other ninjabot for a moment before something leaked out of him: some sort of barely-visible optimism. He stood, venting deeply. Prowl looked up in time to see him put a servo to his mournfully dimmed visor.

"Damn, he got you. Y'sure he didn't run you through a re-formatter? Don't s'pose you'd know—Prowl, y'got any tics you can't explain? Mem'ry gaps? Junk codin'?"

Finally, Prowl knew what he had felt from the other mech. What had been buzzing throughout this entire strange, overly-cautious exchange; what he couldn't quite understand or think about with his partner locked up in the bowels of a heavily guarded Elite ship, waiting in the dark for nothing more than a quick judgment and further imprisonment.

Pity. A striving, gleaming, revoltingly condescending urge to _save_ him from the mech he couldn't function without. Usher in a poor, abused Autobot from the control of a wandering menace.

The poisoned notion echoed in his twisted substructure, and before he knew it, he had spoken.

"I went with him willingly."

Though he could hardly feel his plating, Prowl's gold-lined helm was up. Let the mech see him say it, claim it. Jazz only shook his helm, visor thinning at the thought of such a thorough reprogramming. Mouth twisting, because the youngling almost sounded sincere.

When the bike spoke again, his vocals were tight and not a little bit cruel, half to hurt the mech in front of him and half to earn himself the righteous vengeance that had been hanging over him since the stasis cuffs slapped down: both here and three centuries ago, in a ship he would call home.

"It was in no way a hostage situation but a negotiation. I made my decision centuries ago, Jazz, and I was fully sentient at the time. Never have I been reprogrammed or hacked or had my databanks invaded in any way." Prowl stared up at the Elite, facial plating stony. "If you but request it, I can replay every klik of it for you through my banks and you will see there was no corruption to the data. I left to save myself. I am a deserter to my cause."

Finally, it hit.

Jazz's delusions—hopes—couldn't hold up to the offer of proof, nor Prowl's twisted pride. What was the trusting Guard to think, finding the ghost of a noble Autobot on a planet with a known killer? But the bike was no victim of anything but his own choices, and Prowl would make the other mech see it. He still believed in justice, no matter if he spent so many stellar-cycles inhabiting the grey space in between good and evil.

If this was his end, so be it.

"Wait a nanoklik, you—"

Jazz's vocals were tight. Gone was the carefulness, eroded by the pure weight of the situation. Prowl could see the disbelief as it hit Jazz's face, sapping it of all trust, of all hope and willingness to believe.

"Your team trusted you!" Jazz accused him at last, plating nearly shaking as the full truth broke over him. How wrong he'd been. Prowl only averted his visor.

"And it was neither their first nor last mistake," he said, vocals low. Jazz suddenly hid his long face in a servo, mechanics hitching: a reflection of the pure chaos raging in his processor. The shockwaves of a breaking myth.

There was no silent martyr, no noble ninjabot felled in service to a greater cause. The image of the last battle on the last planet—the image of five mechs fighting servo for servo against the enemy and for each other until one was left and he, too, fell--violently reformed itself in his banks, letting rot in through the cracks. Selfishness. Fear. Weakness.

"You went with 'im. That bounty hunter."

"He offered me an exit from a dangerous situation. I took it."

"And you left 'em there. On that planet," Jazz said, too softly, too suddenly, visor widening with a stunted blip.

Prowl's frigid vocabulary locked him up. The Elite simply stood, incapable of _processing_ such detachment from a cause that had led his own function through danger and worse. He stared at Prowl without comprehending him, like they were creatures of programs and algorithms and something in that grey room didn't add up. The black bike slumped on the chair didn't translate to numbers or a Spark frequency but some ugly combination of logic and weakness.

"You jus' left 'em to off-line?"

"I left them to do whatever they could. Their deaths were not certain," Prowl murmured, taking a shaky intake. The last of the strength left his tensors, optics dimming to a flat grey. "I left them to fight the battle I could not."

"You abandoned 'em!"

Prowl flinched, black plating desperately twitching inwards; Jazz had turned and slammed his servos on the grey table, entire streamline frame wracked with a grief three-hundred stellar-cycles overdue.

"They didn't even turn you in AWOL, Prowl: they went straight to deactivated, 'cos they _trusted you_, down to their Sparks! They thought the _only_ reason you wouldn'ta been with 'em was if you was lyin' grey in some canyon!"

Jazz's vocals fizzled out, only to revive twice as strained. The pain of decades vibrated behind them as he took booming steps towards the seated—trapped—bike, energy field boiling.

"You should'a heard 'em. You should'a _heard_ it when Optimus called in for you, sayin' he'd lost ya. How they couldn't find your shell, how much it killed 'em."

Prowl realized he was shaking only when Jazz's knee-guards hit the floor in front of him again and his big servos clamped into his shoulder-plating. The sportscar's digits tensed as if to rip and tear–it would be so easy to do, tearing his plating away from his rotting wiring and his melting struts as he came apart, piece by piece, and suddenly he _wanted_ to be hurt, if just to stop the shaking—but only dug inwards, yanking the younger mech inches from his quivering facial plating. The Elite's pure aqua visor cut through him, flooding his visual feed with pure hatred in color.

"How many stellar-cycles were you with that crew? How many rules did Optimus break to even have you along? How long did you stop t'process 'fore you ran, saved your own skid-plates? What in the Pit was more important than protecting the whole planet?"

Jazz's rough vocals ground him down to nothing but metal, weak and dead. He couldn't have spoken—there were answers to each of the accusations but the last, most of them clipped time-spans that would never reflect the anguish and guilt he fought for so many stellar-cycles—but Jazz might as well have been screaming to the emptiness of space, black and cold as the bike's plating. Deaf to Prowl's panicked whirr, he jerked the younger mech even closer, vocals reduced to a weak hiss in the other's hot audio.

"You're a fraggin' martyr. Your image is everywhere on Cybertron, your designation piped into Sparklin's processors as a part'n parcel of our goddamn history and you left 'em to die."

Prowl's Spark tightened so sharply all the feeling left his neural net. It returned, in a nauseating rush of choked electricity, just so he could feel dread. Horror. Shame. Jazz's grip tightened on him, electricity field jagged and swollen with a mad grief too wild for words—buzzing, buzzing him numb--and it made Prowl feel _fear_, then the door clicked open a thousand miles away.

"Jazz."

Jazz turned his helm with difficulty, digits tightening into exposed wiring with a squeak—Prowl hardly felt it past the horrible pounding of his Spark. Behind them, two figures filled the doorway. Jazz vented sharply before tearing himself away from the younger 'bot and stepping aside, allowing the bike a full view of Sentinel Prime and the mech who stood beside him: a mech who was not Ultra Magnus, but carried his hammer. Prowl stared numbly at the statuesque sports-alt, red-orange paint-job sliced through with serpentine flames. His stark blue optics were pinned on Jazz, mouth thin.

"I expected irresponsibility from Sentinel, but you?" the mech said, vocals both low and level, both young and so, so very old. Rodimus Magnus shook his helm. "This isn't like you, Jazz."

Jazz looked away and ground his gears roughly, too hurt to trust himself to speak. His state alone explained everything; the servo to his visor, the rattle of his plating, the cold, hateful, _wounded_ feeling daggering from his expertly-tuned electrical fields. A sore spot to everyone's extra-sensory receptors. There was no need to ask why a ghost had returned.

Rodimus looked at his white Guard for a moment more before walking toward the tiny captive, who could only look up at him with the shaking vestiges of shame. Somehow, he was more afraid of the Magnus' utter silence than Jazz's outburst. His blue optics burned through him, foreboding. The Autobot leader looked at the traitor stonily, servo strong upon the Magnus hammer, like there was nothing good left in him.

"Three centuries."

The Magnus' vocals were quiet, but it was enough to make Prowl feel the full weight of that span. One hundred and nine thousand, five-hundred solar-cycles of betrayal, most with a contented half-smile.

"By your definition, I am a deserter," Prowl managed after a moment, vocals barely rising above a whisper. "Consider it a small comfort that I am… grateful for your victory. The universe is safer now, because of your labor and… your sacrifice."

He looked up at the Magnus, both fear and wretched sincerity in the angle of his visor.

"I thank you."

"You must know what you are," Rodimus said at length, vocals hard--as though Prowl had never spoken. "One of the Five."

"I never knew," the bike whispered, Spark decaying once more. If he would die now, as the faint, sick flicker in his chassis said he would, it would be too soon. The idea that he was painted in strong primary colors alongside his teammates, who had given themselves while he had run—

"Traitor."

The soft word made them look over. Jazz was half-hunched over the table once again, servos clamped on the edge of it as though to hold himself in place. His superior—his Lord—said his name, but the deep vocals were not enough to still him. The Guard turned with a screech, lip components curled and visor locked on the prisoner, shaking servos begging violence.

"You're a slaggin' traitor and a killer. How could'ja function, how could'ja _process code_, knowin' what you did and livin' with that monster?" Jazz demanded, vocals only raising when Prowl's helm dropped. "He tears 'bots apart for kicks—or did you take a likin' t'that too? You have him rip that armor off'a some 'bot not even gone cold?"

"Jazz, you are dismissed."

Rodimus' tone froze the much younger mech. Jazz still looked at his Magnus with a blank viciousness before turning and stalking out the door, leaving the room hollow.

"We have the bounty hunter Lockdown in custody, along with his ship," Rodimus Magnus said when the door had closed behind his most trusted Guard. Once more, the cold blue optics pinned Prowl to his seat, narrowed in the only expression of hatred the mech would allow himself. "If you have any statements, now is the time to make them."

Lockdown. Prowl's thoughts were finally freed from the poisonous cling around his own plating. He stared at the floor, visor narrowing as his processor whirred so fast it nearly pained him.

"I am in no position to negotiate. I know this," he said at last, tone brisk. Focused as he was on only remaining calm, he couldn't help but feel Sentinel stiffen: the accusation had been stolen from him. The bully wasn't used to prisoners knowing how defenseless they were. Prowl refreshed his vocals, to sap the desperation he was afraid might leak through in this one last effort. "However, I can offer you one thing: ultimate compliance."

Rodimus nodded.

"Your conditions."

"One," Prowl grit out, muscling down a surge of fear and dread. "Release Lockdown."

Sentinel's engine snarled. The tall red mech did not react. After a moment he shifted his grip on the hammer almost pensively and looked down at the captive, optics narrowed.

"Release the bounty hunter and keep you."

"An Autobot deserter would be a charming addition to your reservoir of political symbols," Prowl said from somewhere outside of himself, lost in the buzz of his processor and his looping pleas, prayers to a god who had long ago ceased to listen. "Just rewards. You will find me nothing but cooperative in any statements you wish me to make, confessions of your own devising or otherwise. If you but release my partner and allow him room to flee in his ship, I will be the perfect captive."

The silence stretched on, colored only by the hum of the living ship beneath them. When Rodimus Magnus spoke, his vocals were low, frame tense.

"May I ask why you are willing to give up you freedom to a criminal—a mech whose crimes outpace yours by hundreds of degrees, in both severity and number?"

Prowl looked up, visor wide; Rodimus tilted his helm solemnly.

"Deserter though you may be, the mech below us has murdered more of our number than we can guess and has been hired to retrieve Autobot bounties for Decepticons. The evidence we have is undeniable."

Prowl looked down; his chamber felt as though it were filling with smoke, snuffing out his star as he thought. Hopes and fears all crowded in, too large for his small metal frame to hold. At last, he nodded.

"Imprisonment would kill him. I can abide it."

"What makes you think it'll just be a cell?" Sentinel challenged him, the growl of his engine alone seeming a rude, stupid interruption. Suddenly, everything seemed like an interruption, even the threatening mech in front of him who held his very function in his servo. He had made his decision.

"Why not? It is little more than a waiting game," Prowl said quietly, then looked up with a sparse, impossible smirk; a certain well-adjusted bitterness he had never felt until that dark moment. "Autobots are too inherently virtuous to pull plugs, and anything short of that… I can survive."

"You speak as though you were never one of us," Rodimus said dully, putting out a servo to quiet the blue mech behind them. His bright optics were still locked on the traitor, who shrugged his plating with a certain helplessness.

"Who better to judge than one who has lived it?"

Rodimus nodded, facial plating hardening.

"And this… hunter, Lockdown," he began, as though the name were not a name at all but a euphemism for a beast. "You believe he will be at all grateful for your sacrifice? Do you actually believe he will not disregard your imprisonment and simply fly on?"

"He may wait for me. He may not." Prowl shook his helm. Something inside the bike slowed at last, and his visor dimmed to a blank, sad grey as he retreated somewhere inside of his motionless frame. "The universe is ruled by letting things take their course."

Sentinel stiffened, baring his blocky white dentals--somehow he knew the ancient poetry and possibly hated such timeless eloquence in the messy barren aftershocks of a war, hated the little bike's gall for continuing to live--but Rodimus did nothing but observe the youngling's fearful silence, the pain in his crouch at the idea of life without a monster. If he had thoughts, he kept them to himself; not a hint of the slow roil of his innards crossed his handsome, austere facial plating, already so tired. At last, Rodimus gestured without looking at Sentinel.

"Have him scanned for hacks. Any discrepancies, I want in a full report." The leader of the Autobots turned, Magnus hammer striking the ground only softly; nonetheless, every mech felt the jagged blue shiver of its power underneath their pedes. He began to walk towards the door. "Afterwards, return him to his designated cell. He is not to see the other prisoner."

Prowl's helm snapped up and his visor refilled with color, a shocked, desperate blue. The door opened again; Jazz was quick to fill it, helm bowed and servos clenched. From behind him, two mechs—a blue and an orange youngling, gifted with a strange structure and an even stranger symmetry—marched into the interrogation room with horribly blank expressions, boyish servos outstretched, and carried the tiny, silent mech to the lab.


	62. Cost

A/N: WOO HOW BOUT THAT LAG, GAIS. Robots, I missed you!

This 'conversation' is so freakin long it's split up into two parts. Sorry, centuries of guilt to cover and lots of flashbacks to pad the length. Now that I've gotten to writing Jazz, I crave other Autobots.

I continue to laugh at myself and my grand delusions that things like 'that Anicon kid' and 'that Elite Guard chapter' are only going to be around for a chapter or two. HAWHAW. Hawwwwwwfail.

* * *

Cost

* * *

Nine stellar-cycles ago, his stutter-glitch was still present, though not nearly as prominent as it should have been for a shy, mangled youngling standing alone in front of the entire Ministry of Science.

Up on the blue-lit dais, his arms propped his toy-like frame upright on the pedestal. It was hard to remain standing under the weight of the brace; the painful noise of his thick, shaky intakes left the assembled scientists tense, all waiting for a sudden slackening of tensors and a clattering impact. The tiny mech in the spot-light appeared to be little more than a white husk, held upright by the struts of medical science and a dying light.

His research was finally complete. Monotone vocals swallowed by the vast presentation hall, the tiny Elite scientist detailed the final stages of the synthesis reaction that would bring the noble Autobots the corrosive organic poison they so desired (enough to kill him for) with his dull optics locked on the datapad in his servo.

His presentation ended and he did not wait for applause. A few unwieldy pede-steps and the stage was left empty; an officer rose to take his place and haltingly dispel the chill the young mech had poisoned the hall with. The scientists began to murmur, servos of all sizes reaching for census modules.

Turning at the clank of a door, Tinus saw his ward limp out of the presentation hall. Not being a member of the Ministry, he had been forced to wait outside. Venting in relief, the Elite immediately moved forward to speak to Anicon, to congratulate him—but found the youngling's optics turned toward the wall, his guardian's very presence unacknowledged.

Like always, Tinus faltered. Like always, since Anicon had regained enough strength to function on his own and his obliging, passive, stuttering ward had become simply _passive_ but in a fashion more bleak than ice, he did not know what to say to one who no longer seemed to function in this world.

"Can you find no room for satisfaction?" Tinus demanded at last, vocals tense. "Centuries, and you are finished."

"Are you pleased?"

His vocals, formerly meek, were thin and raspy, nearly malevolent in their dullness. Anicon's stare did not shift from the wall. Whatever wires had held him into the fabric of rewarding reality before were long disconnected, leaving him hatefully silent if not prompted. Reaction to input: a machine.

"Very," the older mech said unsurely. Anicon looked toward him, round face blank.

"Then offline me."

"Excuse me?" Tinus' tiny optics widened with a stunned blip.

"I had work to do and now my work is done. Release me."

Tinus looked down at the tiny, chromium-girded mech uncomprehendingly, only breaking his stare to glance quickly up and down the hallway, making sure they were alone. This could not go any further in public, especially in the Ministry. He refreshed his vocals, Spark prickling unpleasantly.

"You are… being ridiculous. This presentation means nothing if not further contracts. You have your entire function ahead of you—"

"This is not life. I will not endure it any longer than I have to."

"You expect me to murder you," Tinus hissed at last, vocals hushed in this prestigious place of science and the furthering of function--and deactivation, in turn, but just for those who dared oppose the Autobots. Anicon did not react as though the notion were preposterous, but simply continued staring, emitting that horrible, Spark-numbing buzz no medibot could cure.

Any shock was not long in lasting: frustration with Anicon's ignorant state returned with such force as to blind the older mech. How could he suggest such a thing? The entire community was well aware of the tension between them and had watched the pair carefully since 'the incident': a vague and uninvestigated occurrence that had left a fledgling Elite botanist half-dead with no apparent attacker.

It had been the seventh level of Pit to keep it that way. Tinus had sworn the medics and Mirage to silence and made no attempt to accuse the rogue bounty hunter. It was the only thing to do, if he at all desired to keep his status, and even now he could not forgive himself for ignoring the holes in his idiot ward's story, or failing to care enough to investigate the strange bike sooner.

Guardian and Ward, keeper and kept; their joint existence was a minefield. Regardless of his fragile state, for Anicon to simply cease to function would be the most suspicious thing possible. He would not do it, and the mere idea made him seethe; the young mech _still_ maintained the same infuriating sense of fancy and drama, regardless of whether it had taken a dark turn, and now begged for his very deactivation. The Elite despised his ward intensely in that moment, for his simple unwillingness to face hardship. Tinus gathered himself in a foreboding grind of mechanics, optics darkening.

"Absolutely not," he snapped. "I did not bring you back from the brink of deactivation just to snuff you a few decades—"

"You brought me back to use me!"

The shriek split the empty Ministry hallway, bouncing off the buffed metal walls. Tinus could not help but flinch back: it was the first time Anicon had raised his vocals or even shown emotion since emerging from surgery. Now, his optics were a savage electric-blue, energy field spasming hysterically and making his smothering brace creak.

"You brought me back without a c-care for what I would have to be b-brought back to— your reconstruction did nothing and your neural blockers do even less. You were the only one who c-couldn't see that I was unsal—unsalvageable. You can't understand the pain! You should h-have let me deactivate!"

Tinus stared at the tiny mech he had raised alone for five centuries, giving him only the barest of instruction and no affection. He had restricted his ward to the lab once his calling became clear, considering socialization to be wholly secondary to his potential. He was a guardian, yes, but only in the sense that Anicon came to no outside harm while under his 'care'—a misleading word in and of itself.

With that same mech standing in front of him, shivering with the force it took not to fall apart after how many times he had been destroyed (disappointed, ripped apart, forced to live), Tinus thought perhaps, somewhere, he had made a mistake.

"How d-dare you even refuse! You never claimed to c-care for me but you have n-no right to use me!"

Senseless with fury, Anicon threw his datapad and his life's work at the motionless mech, who did not rise and grab him as expected. Instead, Tinus turned and retreated at a half-panicked pace, the empty hallway echoing with his ward's screams. Following a jerk of the Elite's small frame, the cry cracked and slurped down to an eerily piercing whistle; something had locked up inside of him. The scientist immediately clattered to his knees, intakes backing up with harsh grinding noises, Spark flickering painfully. Tensors seizing again and again, Anicon managed to align his poor panicking mechanics enough to press his servos over his trapped Spark, as though pressure alone would stop the burn of his decaying center. At last, he fell flat to the floor with a loud clang.

His throes went unheard, drowned out by the flood of applause as the Ministry approved the organic-based poison that would be used to drive out the remaining Decepticon colonies on their moon.

For cycles, the mech lay on the floor, destroyed, and simply stared. He drifted, hiding from pain in the quiet white space that always came before he shut down. He looked for better feelings, reaching inwards. His memory banks malfunctioned, then tossed up, as though on a tattered projection screen, an image and neural-byte of a dark-plated mech grabbing him by the neck and slamming him into the side of his home. The monster's red optics flickered, energon draining from his mouth, and the image disappeared.

_You_, Anicon almost rasped, then stilled where the crowd of scientists would find him a half-megacycle later, energon pooled around his glossy chest-plating.

There were many 'bots who were responsible for the dead buzz of his ruined body against the Ministry floor, even the Elites who shouted to each other and carried him to the medbay, but there were only three mechs who figured so intimately into his function—and no matter what happened afterwards, he could never defeat Tinus, he could never regain Prowl, and only one mech had smashed his chamber to shrapnel.

That mech would die.

* * *

Prowl finally allowed himself to lay flat on the scratched-up berth, pressing his facial plates to the lifeless metal and slowly exhaling.

For seven grey megacycles, his existence had been limited to a cell. He could hear little more than the deep grinding and moaning of the war-ship and the clank of the occasional passing soldier—but then, with his chronometer ticking ceaselessly in the heavy dark, the only thing moving inside of him, who could pretend at 'occasional'? No, the soldiers came every megacycle, punctual down to the nanoklik, and Prowl could only try to ignore the merciless reminders of how long he had been away from his partner.

He had only asked once more after the interrogation room, but it made little difference: no matter if he asked a thousand times, or fell to his filthy neutral knees and begged, none aboard the ship would allow him even a glimpse of the musclecar. There was nothing but electrical silence from all four walls of his cell. Lockdown's commsignal was blocked as surely as his celldoor was locked and the silence numbed the small bike megacycle after megacycle, dread sapping him of even the will to move.

Prowl didn't even know if the older mech was online. Had they interrogated him—was he injured in that interrogation? Had war-time changed his culture so drastically that such things were allowed? There was no reassurance in the rare, haphazard contractions of Prowl's Spark and the following slow burn, as though his center were a greasy ball of black gas and flame and not the bright, clean thing he knew it to be.

Nine megacycles had passed since he had been led onto a medical berth, emitting a dead hum as he was subjected to tests of all kinds. They stripped him of his armor, his energy katana, leaving him small and unprotected, then strapped him down. The guards were restraining him with stasis cuffs as a matter of procedure and habit, but could not help but be unnerved by how motionless and pliant he was, even as the cuffs weren't even activated.

The small bounty hunter did not protest. He felt he had no right to, anymore, but it continued to bother him. Why would the Autobots (the term came haltingly, even after all this time) still want to search his system for hacks after he had admitted his crimes?

It didn't matter what they were convinced of—rather, what they believed Lockdown to have done to him, only enhanced by their suspicions of the foreign technology in his chassis and the possible inhibitors stowed within it. He needed to see his partner. It had gone beyond a mental panic into an ache of his Spark. Something was dreadfully wrong.

Suddenly, a tone sounded from his cell wall, blaringly loud after so much silence. A red light flashed once, twice. The bike scraped to his knees, nine slow megacycles of trepidation burning along his substructure as the door opened with a hiss. Two young guards stood in the doorway, one of them holding stasis-cuffs.

They began to enter, but another mech put an arm out and stepped past them—and Prowl realized with a rush of horror that it was Jazz.

Prowl froze down to his Spark. The Elite guard waved the two soldiers back; his presence was so strong, his plating so blindingly white, that they obeyed without a word or an authoritative tone of any kind. With another gesture, they closed the door.

For a moment, Jazz stood at the far end of his cell, silently regarding Prowl with a new expression the younger ninjabot could not figure out—one that made him more ill than he had a word for. It was the same calm, cold expression Jazz had worn when convincing Magnus that he would not lose control again. He understood the prisoner best because of their similar practices, he had said. Rodimus had no time for it, and between Sentinel and himself, it was the wiser choice.

The small cell seemed to seal itself up, trapping the two mechs inside with more than just a shut door. Jazz took a deep intake and rubbed at the large datapad in his servo; Prowl did not know whether he should rise from the berth and stand or remain on the berth—what was proper etiquette for a traitor who still deeply, helplessly respected an elder practitioner? He feared Jazz's first word as he feared physical harm, and watched the other mech with a bright blue visor.

"You been hacked," Jazz said at last, generous mouth flat.

Prowl's helm, rounded and unadorned, lowered a notch. It was what he had been expecting. They would, of course, attempt to demonize Lockdown. What he did not expect was for Jazz to actually break the distance between them and toss him the datapad. It hit the berth with a hollow bang; Jazz stepped back and crossed his sculpted arms, expression dark.

"But it was recent. 'Bout a century ago. Cut two stellar-cycles."

Prowl's processor skipped then raced as he reached for the clunky green data-pad, holding it up to his visor. The multitude of red graphs and garbled read-outs made no sense. Then, plumbing his factual existence for an explanation, Prowl shook his head.

"Incorrect. That was… an EMP blast," he murmured, still staring at the illegible lines that held his very course of function. "I was attacked and the generator overloaded. I lost a few stellar-cycles as a result."

"That what that hunter toldja?"

Prowl looked up. Jazz's expression had not changed, and the accusation in the single sentence made the smaller mech stiffen and turn cold. He began to speak, but Jazz silenced him with a gesture.

"Prowl, overloadin' an EMP generator don't work like that: y'either lose half your mem'ry or all of it, includin' all'a your personality programmin'. You would'a come outta that as a drone or a Sparklin'. No physical way you can cut somethin' as short as two stellar-cycles without goin' in with invasive programs. S'just too precise."

Jazz's visor pinned him to the wall, unwavering. Prowl caught a subtle blue flicker as the Elite's optics doubtlessly touched on everything the medics had thought to note: namely, the scars in his black armor, the hook-marks still bright and deep along his grey flank that were too deep to hide with waxing. The signature of sociopathic monster on the hide of a criminal, the scrawling seal of the twisted codependence they shared.

"He lied t'you."

"I have no reason to believe you."

It came out immediately, as much a product of instinct as fear even as he held the data-pad to his chassis. He knew Lockdown. He _knew_ him.

Jazz shook his helm.

"Scans don' lie," he said, moving forward and dabbing at the screen in Prowl's quivering servos. With a few squeaks of his digit, he brought up a sub-file and traced the path of a red line across the black background. "You can see where the data stream cuts off unnaturally, but the function continues. Clear sign of a hack. He was a good one, but no 'bot can fool Percy."

"He would never do such a thing," Prowl said after a full cycle of staring, vocals hoarse with static as he traced and re-traced the disintegration of that vital red line, entire form numb.

"On principal, or just 'cos he hadn't found a good enough reason yet?"

Jazz's steely vocals implied he should react—wasn't all of this for a reaction?—but the small bike could only sit and clutch the datapad, Spark tightening. _Would_ Lockdown object to hacking someone—to ripping away their very function or, in his optics, a small plot of data? If it was more convenient… what were a few stellar-cycles to a mech who had survived so many of them?

In that moment, Prowl was forced to realize another stark difference between him and his partner, one he never thought would come into play. A sudden fear took him, then it dropped as quickly as it came, perhaps because he simply couldn't handle the idea of being invaded on that level—it was enough of a tragedy that it had happened accidentally. Here, now, there was so much else to worry about.

It was his partner. It was Lockdown. There had to be another reason. There were so many ways to manipulate data. Prowl vented air, short and sharp, and his mouth twitched.

"You are, of course, attempting to turn me against him," he said softly, placing the datapad face-down on the cell berth. Showing him read-outs, giving him the privilege of viewing his own files… He was half-surprised they would waste the effort for such damaged goods.

"Just givin' you the facts, Prowl," Jazz replied, visor still fixed intensely on the bike's half-curled form. His servos clenched and released at his sides, vocals roughening. "I'd say there ain't any harm in it, but obviously your _partner_ hadn't been tellin' you everythin'. Just makin' sure you know the score before you start defendin' a bot who'd take somethin' like that away from you."

Prowl's strange half-calm dissolved and he looked away, visor thinning. Jazz knew. Jazz knew about memories.

"_What's the matter with you?"_

_Prowl looked up at the demand, mostly because Lockdown's vocals were both rough and impatient. He had been sitting on the bridge, staring out at the multitude of stars sliding past Moot's red glass. At Lockdown's prompt, he rose to his pedes with a conflicted expression. One servo played endlessly over his raised welding scar._

_His Spark felt… squeezed. He was certain it was just his sorrow at losing a part of himself—another bit of proof of how ephemeral existence was, hammered in through a irreparable tear in his memory banks—but it felt like something more. Occasionally it would flare up… and that was nothing compared to the definite numbness he felt when Lockdown was separated from him for any length of time._

"_I feel… strange," he managed, vocals soft and slow. He looked out at the stars again; the reflection of his bent visor stood out like a sad aqua smear on the glass. "The EMP accident still lingers with me. I realize it is small, but I feel the gap quite sharply."_

_Lockdown did not respond immediately. He clanked around for a moment or two where he sat on the floor of the bridge, shifting tools back and forth with his big servos, then spoke._

"_This your first time losin' a bit of your memory?"_

"_Yes."_

"_Quit your squeakin'. It happens all the time," Lockdown grunted, slamming the lid to something and hauling it up. "Knocks to the banks, electricity surges. S'why we back ourselves up. Be grateful you didn't get wiped."_

"_Yes, but—"_

_The ninjabot vented some air, starting to push, with difficulty, against Lockdown's hard, functional, factual view of the universe. The slow, purposeful path of the stars outside helped. _

"_It is… very different, for those in my beliefs. Data is not data, when combined with the subjective vapors of the Spark. It is something precious, something irreplaceable. A building block of existence individual to each, and to lose it means to lose a fraction of your very essence—that which Primus gave us in the hopes that we would learn, grow and love, and return to the Well to share our knowledge with the whole. Memories are proof of life, not just a proof of function."_

_He turned, about to continue, but the look Lockdown gave him while stalled halfway to his workshop with his wiry arms full of tools was so impatient and intolerant that Prowl simply bowed his head and frowned, pushing any thoughts of his own loss from his processor._

_There was no time for such things, in their business. He had to adapt and move on. If anything, Lockdown wasn't the one to speak to._

Prowl completely stilled on the cell berth, locked in memories of the strange time after the EMP blast. He had taken memories themselves to be yet another thing they would simply never sync optic-to-optic on, but his partner's strange behavior did not stop there. After their failed communication, Lockdown had stopped dead in the middle of several tasks with no provocation; Prowl turned often to see his partner staring intensely at him, once or twice with his vocals humming as though about to speak. Another moment and he was back at his task with a severe frown, but the ninjabot had never known his partner to be indecisive in any aspect--and the way he behaved during intimacy had been enough to alarm him in the first place.

For the first few months, gone was the growling, playful interface-addict the bike had come to abide if not adore. A hunt added urgency, yes, but anything that passed between them was quiet, crushing and tense. Prowl was constantly startled by Lockdown's servos sliding places he wasn't accustomed to, leaving possessive scrapes over every inch of him.

The sheer intensity of the hulking musclecar's electricity field was enough to knock the smaller mech over the edge early; it left Prowl tender and achy, confusion only adding to his exhaustion. It was as though his partner were attempting to act normal—someone else's standard of normal, even--but something else was leaking through. At the time, the ninjabot attributed it to the fact that the mission he had been attacked on was perhaps more dangerous than Lockdown was letting on. It made sense that the older mech didn't want to show how worried he had been. Perhaps he had almost perished… but even that seemed too simple, as their brushes with danger were so severe and so frequent.

Before he could determine the cause, it was gone and he was forced to move on through the changing kaleidoscope of planets and bounties and morals, left only with a severe sense of discomfort when he thought back on it.

Prowl never thought Lockdown's behavior and the hazy pain in his Spark would be directly connected, but Jazz brought a whole new level of possibility lancing through him when the sports-alt leaned against the cell wall, facial plating once more hard and unreadable.

"One more thing. You got B9 blockers." When Prowl stared at him uncomprehendingly, he asked, "You ever merged with him?"

"No. Never," Prowl answered tensely, gaze dropping to the berth.

"Won't do you any good t'lie," Jazz snapped.

"I swear, we have never done such a thing," Prowl said, vocals thick with want and shame alike. It was as if he were denying that he had ever wanted to, which was the farthest thing from the truth even as Jazz's visor narrowed in something like disgust.

The young bike wanted to merge so badly: his Spark twinged at the very thought. Prowl shook his helm, steadying himself.

"I was… what do the blockers and a merge have in common?"

"Merges function on a wave-length connection. You can block most of the effects of a low-level merge, with the right tech," Jazz said, an unidentifiable emotion flashing across his handsome face before he gestured to the datapad again. "Namely, the tech inside you. Your signal's faint, but there, and so are the blockers. Your hunter 'probly slipped 'em in when he hacked you. We haven't scanned him yet, but you're either merged with him or merged with someone you don' know—you tell me the chances'a that."

Prowl could do no more than stare at the ground, visual feed disregarded as was his every other sensory feed. He could only see a hard puppetry of the act: his tall, monstrous partner giving soundless orders to a hacker as he, small and prone, lay on the medical berth. Prowl's entire known world retracted and hid underneath his plating, hid from further chaos and horror, making him feel overwhelmed and a thousand leagues away from the musclecar crouched somewhere in the belly of the warship.

His whole function had been turned upside-down since the capture, why not this? In this plane of betrayal and looming deactivation, was it so preposterous that he and Lockdown had merged and then the older mech had had him hacked and blocked? What, after all, would move such a drastic action as a removal of his memory, if Lockdown was the cause of it all?

The thought made him ill, made him half-insane in a single moment as he called into question his every action since leaving Earth. Most of all, it made him think of the doubts he had always had: whether Lockdown would actually take well to having another 'bot half-fused with him. It had become a true question whether the ancient mech abstained because it wasn't professional (a thin lie, after all this time, with the way they brushed mouths for the pure joy of it) or because he would hate it and therefore grow to hate Prowl, who had invaded his thorny exostructure.

Lockdown, practical and disenchanted, would never comprehend what the idea of merging meant to Prowl—the intensity of the spiritual connection, the significance of it—but he had clearly formed his own understanding of it. Merging was a broaching of Spark, and therefore an invasion to a soul who had to be plied for two centuries before he even thought of giving anything freely, for sheer love of it. A liability.

Would he hate it enough to invade Prowl's existence and destroy a part of him just to remove the discomfort? To use technology to purposefully deny something as intrinsically vital, so spiritually intimate_,_ as a merge… it was a blow to the bike's beliefs that ranked above even his reverence of memories. Even unknowing, was Lockdown truly that selfish?

The ninjabot couldn't answer the question within a shadow of a doubt and that chilled him: the one place where their lines blurred was Lockown's sense of self. The old mech would give up his very function for Prowl, but not his innermost thoughts. Never his control.

Surfacing from his thoughts for the last time, the young bounty hunter realized that Jazz had moved in front of him, a mere span away. He had a file in his servo, small and grey. Gutted down to his struts and too tired to even feel trepidation, Prowl could do nothing but watch blankly as the older mech took the datapad from the berth and slipped the file in, accessing it with a few strokes at the keypad.

"That's the report done." Jazz lowered himself into a chair, not looking at him, then suddenly pinned him with all the light of his hot blue visor, rich vocals tight. "Now. Want you to hear somethin'."

The datapad booted up and began to broadcast the file. Prowl listened, quivering already, to the static. It rolled on like a white-grey sea, filling the small room, then ended with a muffled click. There was an aspiration, tired, and a click of keys—then deep, ruined vocals Prowl could never forget.

"Earth to Ark, this is Optimus Prime. We haven't heard any word from command for over a half of Earth's solar rotation. We do not know if you are receiving our messages. I repeat, if you are listening to this, if you have any way of sending assistance, do not hesitate. Bumblebee has sustained injuries that our medic can't treat with the resources available. We are in need of basic supplies and further need of energon. And we have—"

A pause. A steadying aspiration. Like a rising black tide from three centuries past, Prowl sensed what would come next and flinched at the very sound of his name.

"We've lost Prowl. He isn't answering. It's… it's common enough, it's what he does—did--but its been… well over two months and he hasn't checked in. His comm is offline. We tried searching as far as we could, but we can't manage much with the Cons on the periphery. We found no shell, but a… destroyed piece of armor and the signs of a battle. Considering the state of war, we can only assume…"

Prowl offlined his optics and shuttered them, a shudder of something unnamable and damning punching through him.

"Please send assistance. Please send word. There are only three of us left."

_So many galaxies and black stellar-cycles away, Optiumus Prime's vents closed. The gray-green glow of a flickering display lit his sole remaining optic, shuttered against the blank screen; a shattered servo slid down the keys of the ruined display._

"Optimus Prime, out."


	63. No Reward

A/N: Jazz. I love you.

This is the Amazing Flashback Chapter of Death and I apologize that half the frikkin chapter should be in italics, but we have a lot of catching up to do. Now you get to see alllll the crap that was going on in the REAL world while Prowl was off in denial.

If you've read To Fly, the dynamics are pretty much in that same vein, but more hopeless and awful.

… Jaaa-aaaaaa-aaaaaa-zzzzzzz. JAZZ.

* * *

No Reward

* * *

The silence that followed the next click—the datapad quietly shifted back into display mode, then sat motionless on the berth—was timeless.

It was hardly legal. Prowl was almost certain of it, but he didn't care. There were some crimes that outpaced legality in their brutality, where any attempt to keep civilized order was blown away by sheer unquestioned cruelty. He did not deserve to be held to the niceties of law.

Jazz did not need to say anything. He did not need to demand _why_. Or how. How could he choose to leave them—or how could he manage to live with himself afterwards.

Suddenly, the Elite's silent, white presence became clear.

This was the whole purpose. This was why Jazz had chosen to do this, to come close to the traitor again: to see the young bike's expression as he relived his betrayal. He wanted to find out _why_, as a mech who couldn't think of doing anything but sacrificing himself for his allegiance. For a long time after the final hiss and click of the recording (Prowl remembered the antiquated equipment, how Ratchet had labored for megacycles to hotwire a system that could reach Cybertronian airspace out of dense, lifeless earth materials) the cell was entirely silent.

Prowl was the first to speak.

"You do not know what it was like."

He told himself that he wouldn't defend himself. That he deserved to stay silent and let judgment be passed, after so many stellar-cycles. But he did.

"You do not understand the insanity of being trapped, away from all forms of assistance. There was… so much at stake."

Prowl's vocals cracked. He refreshed them, processor delving deep and resurfacing with nothing but flashes of grey smoke, pain and laughter as deep and dark as a gorge. The very silhouette of the Decepticon leader, perfectly preserved as a dense black tower with glowing red optics in his memory banks, made him seize up in fear even now.

Heroism was a concept belonging to a finer, more idealistic race—ones who had never personally faced deactivation on a daily basis and had to return to battle again and again with no better odds and enemies that never seemed to tire. Heroism was a clean, split-second ordeal, but what happened when the battle dragged on and exhaustion, horror, insanity, faithlessness set in? The conflict had cruelly narrowed to their own rapidly beating Sparks: it was not _retrieve the Allspark shards and reach command and save Cybertron_, but _kill the other mech to survive another klik_.

The fear narrowed them further, from a team to cold individuals clawing for their own little lights.

"The Allspark and the planet beneath us, both. So many humans died. We tried to protect them, but the Decepticons… destroyed so much. It was senseless. They began to provoke us by slaughtering humans. We were the only thing standing against a force of that magnitude, fighting daily and running nightly… murdered one by one and turning against each other out of nothing more than sheer terror."

"Like we weren't trapped on the other side'a that barrier? Fightin' off the rest of the Megatron's soldiers while the Allspark was waitin' for us on the other side?" Jazz snapped immediately, one servo clamped on his knee as he leaned toward the smaller, bowed mech, gesturing viciously. "All the hope we had was sittin' on Earth, with nothin' but a rookie bunch of space-bridge mechanics to defend it. _That's_ insanity, Prowl—that's unbearable. You know how—how goddamned awful it was, gettin' Prime's transmissions orn after orn and not bein' able to do anything about it, even send word _back_?"

The white sports-alt's helm bowed suddenly, something swelling and failing inside of him, draining his plating of its gloss. One servo came to cover his facial plating, his core noise reduced to a soft, hopeless hum.

"I couldn't handle it. Jus' couldn't. Ultra Magnus was s'posed to be the one who could, and he..."

Prowl quivered from the sharp outpouring of grief in the other mech's swollen fields, invading and filling his unprotected innards as distinctly as liquid. It had been a century, but the pain was still so acute. Jazz vented heavily, fighting to keep his vocals steely.

"There's always two sides in war, Prowl. Really, you'll be damn lucky if there's only three or four. Everybody's got a story."

It didn't change what he did. Didn't change what anyone did.

The two ninjabots sat in silence in the small cell, blue visors (one true, the other misleading) directed into corners, thoughts dense. What had begun as punishment rebounded upon the punisher, tearing them both with equal force. At last, Jazz refreshed his vocals as if to speak. Before he could, he froze, and an ugly expression crept over his handsome facial plating.

A second later, his comm-system trilled. The Elite guard put a digit to his helm-set, expression turning from ugly to dark.

"No. Can't. Tell 'im I'm busy, an' to keep his fan-blades down. No, whatever he's got ain't more important. Orders from Magnus. Tell 'im I'm—whaddya mean he won't talk to me?"

There was a determined-sounding sequence of beeps, as if the Elite tested another comm-line only to find it dead. Jazz hissed through his dentals.

"For the--goddamn, a'right. I'll be up in the m-cycle. An' tell SP he'd better cool off or I'll have words for 'im. You tell 'im that."

He ended the call with a tense puff of air, bending over onto his knees as he returned to rubbing his slack facial plating. Across from him, Prowl studied the other ninjabot with a wary expression. Though he had heard nothing but Jazz's side, it was obvious enough who he was speaking of—and the strong flare of the older mech's energy fields, reaching across metal partitions to transmit to him another mech's feelings, could have no other source.

"You are bonded with him," Prowl murmured, strange expression deepening with true worry when Jazz looked up, helm almost too heavy to lift. "With Sentinel Prime."

"Merged," the older mech said after a hard pause, visor darkening to a chilling blue. He turned his helm away, mouth thin, vocals tight. "An' not by choice."

* * *

The shrieking, whistling sound of black-plated Cons ripping the soundbarrier in half was enough to make his Spark shrink down to nothing, even after all this time.

"S'okay, SP, it's all gonna be okay—"

The other mech's bulky blue arms were covered by rubble from the explosion that had thrown them underground, but the klik one servo burst free, it clamped onto Jazz's arm hard enough to make the smaller soldier jerk. The Elite's faceplates crumpled further when he realized there were sparking holes were two of the Prime's digits should be, but that was nothing compared to the fearful static gushing from Sentinel's crushed helm, rattling his dislodged optic. The thicker mech's legs were snapped in several places, his dark tensors splayed like the tip of a flail. The front of his chassis was dented, even as it worked helplessly up and down with Sentinel's aspirations.

Jazz had hailed the medics, but they gave no response. They were on their own, for the time being. Quickly, the Elite guard opened a channel between him and his partner; his solid energy field reached out and synced, sending back a painful gasp of existence if not meticulous scan results. Either way, Jazz felt enough. Anguish blasted through him, fear nearly made his already-charred processor stall.

Sentinel was going offline and he was going fast and hard and screaming silently every klik of the way.

What he did next wasn't instinct. It took thought and time the ninjabot didn't have, hesitance he shouldn't have had. It was a risky technique—something Yoketron had told him only to employ when there was the highest of needs… but right there, that clinched it. What more need was there than a mech he'd sworn to protect offlining in front of him?

Jazz heaved himself up, crawling over the huge mech's chassis with harsh metal-on-metal creaks and one horrible snapping noise. He only realized how badly his own gears were stripped the moment he tried to move, but he focused on releasing the catches to Sentinel's chassis in the dusty purple phosphorescence streaming in from the planet atmosphere above. The ninjabot made his numb digits move like they should have by sheer force of will as a bomb fell close to them and shook the air and ground alike, chasing his Spark deeper within its cold chamber.

He had to half-pound the dent out to get the Prime's chamber-plates to give, but the only other option was ripping them off. The pain had stunned Sentinel into stasis and within a few cycles, the blue mech's spitting green-yellow Spark was exposed, convulsing from the chaos of its shell. Jazz vented deeply and tried to beat down his fear of that light as he reached for the Power.

Just like before, he opened a channel between them, only this time his own Spark was healthy and bare on the other side of it: it fed that rioting green-yellow smear of life all it could, keeping it from flickering out. Spark-Spark connection, ancient circuit-su technique. He had only ever used it as a meditation technique before, when connecting with Yoketron to further his own compatibility to the Power thrumming around him.

Here, pulling a dimming light back into a broken body, the power it took simply to remain in control of his mechanics was circuit-blowing. Sentinel's pain leaked into him, pooling in his joints, twisting his coding into knots. Jazz barely found enough spare function to keep talking to his partner, force-feeding him positive feelings through the connection until Sentinel's servo re-fastened on his wrist, squeezing helplessly.

"Just hold onto me. Right there. Thassit. Good. They're on their way. C'mon SP, face up. You're gonna get outta this."

He didn't know whether it was the truth, but he also felt Sentinel slipping further away as kliks then cycles went by—then, suddenly, the other mech's center was _pulling_ on Jazz with a force equal to that of the Well pulling on him. Jazz hissed, vocals crackling in a panic. He instinctively threw up his shields even as they did nothing against the violent spasm of energy from Sentinel: the mad throes of deactivation.

Panicking at the feeling of an approaching void, Jazz tried to push Sentinel away and snap their connection, but two ruined servos locked onto his front with a strength borne of the last push before darkness. The push towards the light, any light—the only light the dark world and the darker cave could offer.

The last thing Jazz felt was a crippling pain as his precious chamber-plating was crunched, then Sentinel slammed them both together with nothing but a wordless static-scream of fear and a world-ending flash of light.

Blackness came and went. It was like recovering from a bomb. The ninjabot's systems booted up one by one—then suddenly, with the flare of his awakened Spark, it was so much worse than a bomb. Worse than deactivation.

Jazz bolted upright and a spurt of horrified static and his own mangled vocals poured out of him, an auditory rush of a grief so instantaneous and eternal it nearly ended him right there. The wail echoed through the dark cave. Senselessly, he clawed at his dirt-streaked front, where Sentinel's digits had marked him—and deeper, where the mech himself resided in Jazz's center, ugly and immovable.

"Why? Why man, jus'—"

His deep vocals cracked, frame shaking. Then, as if to save himself, the white mech was rushed with an urge to kill; to hurt the selfish soul that had stolen his first merge from him. That same selfish Spark was now gushing through his own, always with an undercurrent of resentment and _ego and fear_ even as the miserable mech lay flat-lining in stasis—but that was just it.

They were the same now. There was nothing left separating them but their plating. It was done.

Jazz realized he was grabbing Sentinel by the throat the same moment he let go. The futility of it cracked him clean in half. The white mech sobbed as he pounded at the ground until his servo splintered, helplessness and disgust sending him to his ruined knees.

"Goddamn you! You belong in the Pit, you—"

His rage was such that his battered body couldn't hold. With a loud snap, Jazz fell and curled in on himself, swamped by red warning screens and the invasive thrum he would bear for the next three centuries. He put his helm in his servos and whispered into his dirty-smeared plating.

"Oh god. Primus, please. Take it away. I ain't done anythin' but good. I tried so hard. Why can't… why can't you jus' take it away?"

The whistle of a bomb was his only answer and the medics never came.

* * *

"We've all made sacrifices, Prowl," Jazz said too softly, passing his servo over his visor as wiping away the scene. The violation. Then his lip curled. "Unlike some."

Visor long ago trained demurely on his own servos, Prowl off-lined his optics and did nothing more than feel every part of the shame he had avoided for so long.

The bike couldn't imagine the horror of being linked with a 'bot as hostile and hateful as Sentinel, much less if one didn't have the slightest of regard for him. And still… the expression on Jazz's face when speaking of the blockers came back to him. He wasn't using them. Though he despised Sentinel, though the merge was non-consensual and clearly painful, he would not dishonor the happening by stifling it with technology.

Jazz was living through it until it passed. He was submitting to the universe, when that same option had been ripped from Prowl by the blockers. The mere thought made Prowl ill again and desperate to think of something else—but all he could remember was the mech who had taught him that to touch two Sparks was the most intimate act possible.

"Yoketron remained a neutral for as long as he could," he murmured at long last, hardly paying attention to what he was saying or his dislocated logic. "He only became an Autobot because he realized he would be recruited and forced to murder, otherwise."

He instantly knew he had said the worst possible thing. Jazz rose from his seat so quickly he overturned it; Prowl flinched from the noise as much as the fury daggering from the other mech.

"You're gonna bring Yoketron into this? You're _really_ gonna--fine then. _Fine_," he barked, unclenching a servo to jab it at the much smaller mech. "Yeah, he was unaligned before, when we were just politicals--until the Cons turned to lawlessness and he realized how many good 'bots were in danger. How many 'bots were dyin'. Until he realized that bein' neutrals was one'a the greater evils when we got somethin' worth fightin' for."

"And y'know what? In a perfect world, Yoketron would still be neutral. We could follow the path peacefully. There wouldn't be anythin' but differin' philosophies, little goods and little evils. Nothin' but different ways'a kindness, no _need_ for sides. This ain't a perfect world."

Prowl ducked his helm, knowing what was next simply by the tremble in the other mech's vocals.

"You deserted us when we needed you most. Now, us, we did what we had to do. The _right thing_. We did whatever it took to make everything equal again, and some of it was awful. In fact, most of it was, and now we're payin' for it. Now we're tryin' damn hard to fix what we fragged up on the way."

The black-plated mech curled on the berth seemed to be an indescribable stain the older mech couldn't face. Jazz turned towards the cell wall, suddenly slow to move. He bowed his helm, another wave of dense, nauseating sorrow pulsing out of his near-transparent plating.

His defense was too fevered, too desperate, for a true believer. More than that, there were no _true _believers left after the war, only mechs that got by on what they were told. No one could have total faith. Not after what they had seen. Centuries of uncertainties seeped out in the silence as Prowl had nothing to say: there was nothing to counter Jazz's slanted righteousness with, and so it finally collapsed in the presence of a traitor who listened.

"Aw g—Primus. Primus, did we frag it up."

As suddenly as the focus had centered on Prowl and scorched him, it was lifted.

"Please," he shocked himself by saying. Perhaps the only 'bot in the whole Elite Guard who understood what had been at stake was right in front of him, shaking at the joints, and Prowl was even more shocked by the fact he needed to hear it. Everything.

"Tell me."

"I… I off-lined so many 'bots," Jazz began weakly. He shook his helm, which scratched lightly against the wall. "Y'hear that all the time, s'pose. There was somethin' to it, y'know, when they was chargin' at you and y'couldn't think but to put somethin' through their middle. But when it started gettin' ugly at the end of the war, when we were makin' sure the Cons didn't have the sparkplugs to get up again… Poisons came into it. We started doin' raids.

"They kept tryin' to keep me out of it. Y'know, use the lower grunts to do the dirty stuff, but I said no, I wanted to come. Not 'cos I liked it—never, even though some maniacs did—but to keep m'self up about what we were doin'. So no one could hide anythin' from me, tell me everything was alright."

Jazz's thin, crushed laugh told volumes: nothing was ever alright.

Prowl wouldn't have had half the courage required to willingly walk into slaughter after slaughter of a dying people, just so he himself wouldn't be spared. Jazz had force-fed himself war so he never became deluded, so the pain would always be fresh. The younger ninjabot tried to imagine the paradox of forcing yourself to do a horrible task only so someone else couldn't make it worse than it already was.

That was martyrdom without the relief of death--and how long had it continued?

"We kept drivin' em further and further off, always wonderin' where they were based, what kept 'em going--then one time we found it, packed away in the back of some black-as-night cave. The last few protoforms from the Entrustment. You remember that," he said suddenly, as though realizing there was someone else in the room again. Prowl started, then nodded.

"I was the last student with Yoketron when the Decepticons raided the dojo," he said quietly, earning himself a glazed look from Jazz. It contained a certain half-formed jealousy that the small bike had been the last to see his master. Prowl had returned in time to see Yoketron enter the Well, true, but Jazz had never gotten to say goodbye.

"Huh. The Cons that'd holed up there had… all these twisted pieces'a armor, forged. They'd literally shoved waste-metal into a jerry-rigged furnace and tried to make it look like plating, tried to rebuild themselves, and y'could see these ashy pieces of it crunched on the floor. The rest of it they'd scrapped them off'a offline Cons and laid out in scrambled shapes, 'bot shapes. Everythin' was filthy. Picture of poverty, picture of desperation.

"But when my headlights hit those protoforms, tucked at the back, I couldn't see anythin' but hope. They were all perfectly laid out, untouched in a sorta fanatic way with some un-cut photoluminescent gems laid around 'em. It was the only wealth the planet had to offer, the only thing that was any special on that Primus-forsaken dustball of a rock where they'd been ekin' out a livin' on for 'bout a decade, and I thought, this is love. This is respect. The Cons value life jus' as much as we do."

Prowl's vents caught at the sadness on Jazz's face when the older mech turned around. When he spoke again, his rich vocals were dull and empty of inflection.

"A mech on my team shot two of 'em before I could stop him. Started screamin' about Con protoforms, about… injectin' the evil into their plasma. Like they were gonna Spark on their own and try to offline him. We got him by the struts and got him back, but the thought killed me. That we'd gone so far into sides and hate that we can't even recognize life."

Jazz's vocals caught painfully. It was all the more intense that the small mech across from him knew exactly what kind of crime it was to the universe—to Primus Himself—to destroy protoforms, even unSparked. Protoforms were innocence and unlimited potential incarnate, His Gift. The madness in it made a 'bot even slightly attuned to the Power quail.

"Nothin's Sparked evil. Nothin'," Jazz finished too quietly, visor dimmed to a mournful blue-grey. "Evil's a learned thing, and I ain't sure most'a the Cons are what you'd call evil. They were just tryin' to save themselves, thought Megatron was the way t'do it… and whatever they are now, we turned 'em to it."

That meant two things: 'bots self-perpetuated the cycle, evil teaching evil, and Jazz had witnessed the destruction of one of the purest things in existence. Creations that, just like Prowl, he had been charged to protect while in the dojo.

"You saved the last one," Prowl managed, Spark clenching in fear of the answer. Jazz shook his helm.

"Jus' think'a how alone that one protoform's gonna be," he answered simply, visor trained on the ceiling.

Prowl watched as Jazz nearly pressed himself to the wall, a long-blocked portion of himself breaking free as he surrendered, finally, to the grief of all that he had seen. All that he had done in the name of good: all that he hadn't been able to do. The bike channeled it as if it were his own, and in a way, it was.

Mostly, he remained silent and allowed the other mech what his allegiance wouldn't: doubt.

Jazz's comm-line rang again. He blocked it, venting shakily. A few kliks later, the perfectly synced pede-steps of the guards came down the hall but stopped at the door to the cell with an about face double-stomp. They were small enough that only the tops of their helms, orange and blue, were visible through the window.

"Elite Guard Jazz." The duplicate vocals were harsh and synthesized, accented. Jazz flinched from them, pushing his face into his servo as though a whole new weight had hit the deep crack in his armor. "Check in."

"I'm fine." When there was no movement from outside, Jazz shook his helm quickly and fought to turn up his vocals. "I mean… I mean, check in unnecessary. Dismissed."

"Sentinel Prime is requesting you."

"I know it. I'll be up. Dismissed."

"Acknowledged."

After another pause, the pedes resumed their relentless march, leaving the two bots in silence once again.

"May I ask you a question, Jazz?"

Jazz looked at Prowl tensely, as though he had forgotten the traitor entirely—or forgotten that he was a traitor. He was as tired as the younger mech. He narrowed his visor, uncomprehending of Prowl's soft tone or civility, then nodded. The bike gestured toward the empty window.

"Who… are the younglings?"

In the middle of being dragged from the interrogation room, Prowl had been grasped on each arm by a pair of identical but unfamiliar models: the same guards that had just checked on them. Both were willowy and colorful and blank in the face—and he had not failed to see the pain in Jazz's expression as the two had saluted their Magnus and stepped from the room. There was a wavelength connection between the two of them, even though Prowl couldn't fathom it because they seemed to be drones: they dragged him to his cell at least twice and, each time, he could not sense any kind of higher function from them.

At the mention of the strange 'bots that had just passed, Jazz's handsome face fell again. His servo rose to rest anxiously on his chamber plating, digits sticking in the scar there.

"They're, ah… one of 'em is named Jetfire. Other's Jetstorm," he said, soft vocals choked. "They were mine. I mean, I took care of 'em. S'posed to be soldiers. S'posed to be…"

Prowl waited, but no more words came. Jazz's helm dipped, fresh pain creeping onto his face.

"Their model…" Prowl said gently.

"Jet-based." Prowl's surprised look was answered with a dull shake of the other's helm. "Stole the schematics from Starscream and reformatted a pair of Spark-twins. New tech. For use in the war. Magnus' project."

Besides Jazz's obvious pain, Prowl struggled to make sense of the leap. The mere thought of Autobot jets… how alien. In the time he had been gone, how far had the Autobots risen—and fallen?

"And… did the conversion raze their personality programming?"

Jazz answered him on both counts, rich vocals breaking slightly.

"No. Someone else did that."

* * *

A loud tone woke Jazz up out of crazy-heavy recharge. The next thing he heard was surround-sound creaking and it was disorienting as Pit, deep vibrations ghosting through his solid berth. Jazz struggled onto his elbow and saw the source of the tone: the blue entry light above his door.

"Wha', now?" His vocals were scratchy with a quick reboot, his insides as slow and sleepy as the blue-tinged dark. Jazz checked his chronometer fuzzily then rubbed his facial plating, venting into his collar with a thick noise. "Come on in."

"Mister Jazz, sir?"

They entered with timid little clanks; Jazz unshuttered his optics to see the twins, orange and blue, arms braced with one another and looking unbearably small even in the sports-alt's cramped quarters. He said their names, fuzzily, trying to figure out why they would be visiting in the middle of his off-shift.

Jetstorm's helm snapped toward the door as it closed behind them, servos tightening on his twin with a tense creak that was almost lost in the groaning of the ship around them.

"We are…" Jetfire began, then ducked into Jetstorm's front, who nodded.

"Hearing things," the blue youngling whispered.

The Ark was creaking something horrible; Jazz could hear it in full, now, twisting in cold space. He could feel the ugly electrical tension from the shields and the occasional aftershocks of an explosion. Another attack. A routine attack, at that. His quarters were in the middle of the ship, by the command center and the fast tracks; the twins' was more out to the side, so they would hear more.

Jazz suddenly felt exhausted, thinking of how frightened they must have been.

"Oh, that's jus'…" he mumbled, searching for an excuse, then looked up. The young jets' wide optics glowed piercing tangerine and aqua in the dark of his small quarters, too intense for health's sake.

Looking at them (and feeling the pathetic jitter of their abstracted, strangely-merged-strangely-separate energy fields, which were as much a product of their twinness as their new tech) Jazz realized there was nothing he could say to bring down that frantic color—and he didn't want to be the one to explain what no one had bothered to tell them from the beginning. They were in a war.

Instead of wasting his time with words, the sports alt just shook his helm and let out another puff of air, making a vague sweep of his servo.

"Come on, kids."

Even with permission, the twins lingered at his door, huddling too close to each other and aspirating in time. Jazz had to sit up and gesture toward his berth, even then wondering if he could manage to squeeze the two of them in—or if he should. Sentinel was always saying he was getting too close.

With the thought, Jazz only became more resolved. Sentinel already was with him—and them--too much, but he had no place here. The sports-alt took Jetstorm's servo and half-lifted the slight model up over his legs.

It worked, but only barely. After some shifting, Jetfire and Jetstorm lay down, one curled on either side of him, with their little bodies right under his arms and their heart-shaped faces tucked against his wheels. After a moment, their servos carefully slid up and clasped over Jazz's middle. After a cycle or three of quiet, safe function, both younglings insulated from the creaking ship by the circle of Jazz's arms, they drifted into recharge at the same time.

Jazz lay between them and stared at the ceiling in something like awe. It was like being in the center of a circuit, with those two identical energies steaming to either side of him, and Jazz was struck with the strangest mixture of peace and anxiety that followed him into recharge. His servos cupped their narrow backs, keeping them close.

Already, he loved them too much to deny them anything—and in war, emotion was the first thing rationed.

* * *

Fire flared to his left, and Jetfire felt as much as saw the painful orange of it when Jetstorm cried out into the dark, missile-streaked sky. Spark convulsing, Jetfire immediately transformed with a panicked series of snaps. The air caught his still-extended wings and slammed him into a summersault. The alien world spun horribly and it knocked him higher up amid the roar of firearms and dying mechs, too low to scramble for his twin, falling like a stone to the distant black ground.

"Brother!"

Jetfire only glanced once at the hull of the Decepticon warship lying a league away, blown open just wide enough for two small 'bots to infiltrate, before gunning his jets and diving for his twin—right into the cite of a plasma canon that ended his scream before it began.

* * *

Jazz always tried to fight away from them, just because the urge to keep an optic on them was too strong.

The kids had to learn to take care of themselves and, honestly, he didn't have a sensor to spare. It was hard enough to keep himself online in a pit of Cons, but when the two slim jets streaked over his helm, Jazz couldn't help but look up; couldn't help but see the blossom of fire and the delayed _boom_ as the missile hit Jetstorm broadside, making him spin like a top.

The hue of orange explosives nearly stopped his Spark cold. It was all Jazz could do not to transform and speed over to them, but Ironhide was there to catch his shoulders and shove him backwards, making him comply with the blasting note of the retreat-horn. Jazz tried to think that, if the twins were on the ground, their plan had failed. No one would infiltrate the Leviathan and the entire battle, a death-trap staged on the hope that someone could plant the bomb, was for nothing.

He tried to think about it in terms of _who died for this_ but couldn't think of anything but the twins. His twins. Primus, what had happened?

He was back on the Ark and hauling it to the med-bay the moment Red Alert checked him off—he had a nick across his front and a slashed tire but that was it—struggling to think what he would do if he didn't find them in there. The Elite rounded the corner with a screech just as they appeared, both of them piled onto one medical berth like a tangle of blue and orange spare parts.

Spark contracting and expanding at the same time, Jazz shouted at them. Jetstorm looked up from his limp orange twin in his arms, visor giving a weak flicker at the sight of the sports-alt. Optics reduced to a muddy ochre, one of Jetfire's arms was connected by a scant few singed wires surrounded by craggy metal scraps. Both tiny jets were smeared with dirty pink energon and scorch marks. Panic flared deep inside of the older mech.

"Mister Jazz!"

"You're gonna be fine, baby!" he roared, speeding up. He just had to touch them before they went in, somehow he knew it would make sure they came out okay. "Don't worry, don't you worry—"

Jerking forward, Jetstorm reached for him and was pulled back by a nurse. Jazz called their names right as their cart disappeared into the doors of the medbay with a final-sounding snap.

"No—no, no, wait! Goddamnit!"

He made a right turn and slammed into the window, where white-plated mechs and femmes were pushing each other aside in the chaos of panicked pink spills and sparking wires. Jazz pressed his servos to the glass until the filaments switched and the window went black, as it always did during intense surgery. He pulled up both of their frequencies, desperate to know that they were still alive on the other side of that black wall—too many mechs had been taken behind it only to have privacy to deactivate.

_--Baby? Baby, you okay? You solid?_

It didn't matter which one he was speaking to, but Jazz could hear Jetstorm whispering on the other line.

_--You are hearing me, brother? Mister Jazz is saying we are to be fine--stay, brother, stay. Stay for Mister Jazz. Please, brother. Please, say you will stay with me--_

A great crackle of static cut it off. Left helpless at the window, the Elite let his helm fall to the wall, echoing down to his aching struts. After a moment, he forced himself to leave the closed doors and report to Magnus about the young bots behind it—not that they might be offline, but what they had failed to do.

He had expected anger. Frustration. What he received was silence: and a darkening of Magnus' stormy optics that couldn't have prepared Jazz for what was to come.

* * *

It was four hard solar-cycles before Jazz saw them again. Of course he went back and checked again and again: he regularly got off patrol three cycles early just so he could run down to the medbay and rubberneck, but Red finally told him to stop checking. Flat and brusque as always, she swore that he would be the first one informed of their release—but he wasn't.

The older femme was always ready with narrowed, impatient optics whenever he jogged up to check on his twins, but the third solar-cycle, her sculpted helm was bowed as she told him she thought they were on the bridge. Surprise and irritation warred in him, but only briefly. In the time it took to nod, he had turned and was weaving through passing soldiers, jogging towards the bridge.

Grudges were against his nature: it was in his programming, and he could excuse a break-down in communication if it meant he'd be getting his kids back.

The bridge door opened with a swipe of his coded servo. Jetfire and Jetstorm were standing in front of Ultra Magnus, Sentinel at attention to the side. The bridge was unusually quiet, but relief rippled through the Elite to see the two jets standing upright, their plating still bright if scratched.

"Aw, thank th'lord."

A few engineers looked backwards at the husky exclamation. Jazz was too overjoyed to see the uncomprehending wariness in their expressions—he could see nothing but intact blue and orange plating three lengths in front of him--so he just moved toward the slender twins, taking both of them by the shoulder with a playful little rattle.

"Sizzle and Fizzle, back in business!"

He opened his mouth to say something more—perhaps smilingly apologize to Ultra Magnus for the interruption—but he stopped at the heaviness of the bodies underneath his servos. They did not turn at the sound of his vocals and, touching them, something felt wrong.

No, more than wrong. There was a buzz inside of them, like something had been suppressed a level. A flat-line.

Coolant suddenly prickling under his plating, Jazz tugged Jetfire back a step and the youngling looked up at him with dead orange optics. The tiny jet scanned him with a tilt of his chin, every gear-click audible, then turned his helm back towards Ultra Magnus and did not move. Jetstorm did not react.

"What… what's happenin'?" Jazz asked, vocals weak. He gave them another small push: both remained dense and immovable, optics locked on the blue and white mech towering above them. "Kids?"

"An upgrade," Ultra Magnus said, scrutinizing the small jets underneath Jazz's servos. "Perceptor has been developing it for some time."

"But—this can't be an upgrade. This idn't _them_! Perce wouldn'--" Jazz unhanded the twins only to press his servos to his face as their dead-buzz finally penetrated all the way to his Spark, telling him everything he needed to know about the state of their insides, their _center_. The Elite shook from the shock of it, choking out, "Primus, what happened to 'em in there?"

"Their personality programming was wiped, along with some advanced cognitive programs. The product of an error, but not altogether inopportune." Ultra Magnus returned Jazz's panicked stare with nothing but a small, mechanical nod, optics neither darkening nor lightening. "Their behavior was unfitting. They sacrificed the objective."

"What?!" Jazz demanded, vocals rising in a crash of disbelief and fear. "Fire tried to save his brother--that a crime, now? Protectin' someone ya love?"

The fact he was raising his vocals at his commanding officer when Ultra Magnus had had mechs court-marshaled for less did not penetrate the dense rigor that had claimed Jazz's Spark. Magnus' expression did not change and Sentinel did not move. Lost with a silent bridge all around him, seeming to be the only one witnessing the tragedy in front of him, Jazz turned back to the twins. He took Jetstorm's helm and ran his servos over his audios, his slack facial plating, the tip of his visor—and felt nothing but dead-dead-dead underneath his white digits.

They would only respond to direct programming now. Shells.

"Oh god, baby, talk to me—say anythin'--"

Ultra Magnus watched the black and white mech beg and plead, unflinching and uncaring, then brought his hammer down on the floor of the bridge.

"Sentinel Prime."

As if snapping out of stasis, the bulky blue mech saluted his commanding officer and moved forward. Jazz instantly pushed him away when Sentinel's huge servos caught him by the arms, struggling to stay close to Jetfire and Jetstorm. Sentinel said his title again and again, fully aware of the optics of the entire bridge when Jazz could only see the shells in front of him, then finally hissed his name and grappled the ninjabot up against his chest-plate.

The restraint-hold and the bond-energy pulse was enough to sap the strength from Jazz's tensors, but he still watched with a muddy-blue visor as the twins turned in terrifying tandem—snap snap clack, their pedes struck the floor in a flawless about-face--and marched after Ultra Magnus when the commander exited. He didn't realize his servos were dug into Sentinel's flank-seams until the younglings were out of the room and he realized _they were gone_—and not lost to any missile blast or fire as he had always feared. The grief hit him full-force, making him push with a dumb horror against the mech holding him.

"Oh. Oh Primus," Jazz whispered, shaking his helm again and again. He refused, denied, _said no_, because this was the last infraction he could suffer. He could not continue. He could not fight, knowing this could happen and the universe would do nothing.

They were so young. Where was the sense, where was the Order? He fought for his people, yes, but that had long ago become a nebulous concept, incapable of nursing such immediate wounds and fear. Here, now, and for stellar-cycles before… he fought for his friends and for the twins. Would he lose all of them and be left with nothing but victory?

"It's what had to be done," Sentinel hissed in his staticking audio, clutching hard at Jazz's arms. But no matter his words, his vocals were husky and horrible and his entire frame trembled to rival Jazz's: it was the only sign of something breaking inside of him.

He had not been able to resist falling in love with the younglings in his own way and the god of his cause had finally become a machine.

Processor blanking, Jazz gave up and sobbed into his partner's wide shoulder, electrical fields convulsing piteously as though every sound were a small death. One more reason to function was stripped from him as surely as plating. As the entire bridge tried not to watch, Sentinel held the older mech, or simply kept him upright, and, for once, they felt the same thing: grief.

* * *

"Jazz. I…"

Jazz shook his head viciously, then stopped, preternaturally still. His blank visor glowed a lethal aqua. Cowed and horrified, the mech who betrayed his faction waited for the mech who was betrayed by that same faction to speak.

"Y'what. You _what_, Prowl."

"I am sorry," Prowl murmured, vocals crushed. "I am so sorry."

"Sorry don't fix anythin'. Sorry don't bring anybody back," Jazz snapped. He looked up, expression suddenly fierce, almost destructive. "If you'd stayed--if you'd fought, you think Optimus might be online? You think one more 'bot could've tipped the scales and let him out in one piece?"

Jazz had a feeling about that mech. He had only met him once, but it was such a feeling. They _needed_ him. The war needed him: things would have been so different, if he had been allowed to grow up and take Magnus' place before the coldness, the insanity, set in. What if Magnus had handed the hammer to him, instead of keeping it away from Rodimus' grasping servos, radiating jagged blue lightning and bellowing as he was cuffed by his own officers? But that was another world: a fantasy. Now, the young Prime was a pile of disintegrating metal in a tomb, a sadness to his people.

Optimus Prime. He would have been a leader. He could have saved the Autobots from the victory they now endured. Jazz felt the loss deeply even as it was only in his Spark.

"No," Prowl answered, shaking his helm with shame. "I would have off-lined with them. I would have been useless—yet another casualty."

"At least you would'a been servin' your cause. Greater cause than your own fraggin' skidplates," Jazz said, but his vocals were soft and ruined. He had no more room for anger, even if the questions never ended. "How could you keep goin', knowin' what you did?"

The Elite seemed to ask it for himself—how could one continue with full knowledge of crimes committed in the name of any cause? How could one function, knowing they had killed the heroes of another side, another story? Prowl bowed his helm, servo pressed over the blank spot on his chassis.

"I went with Lockdown because I was afraid. I stayed with him because I grew to love him," he answered at last, shuttering his optics as he thought once more of the musclecar—not anything he had been told, but as he _knew_ the mech, Spark and hard servo and grudging smiles. His partner. "Without that anchor, I would have surrendered centuries ago. My guilt was such that I would have begged to be offlined, or done it myself. This much is truth."

The idea of ending one's own function was so serious in their faith that Jazz did not question it, nor the small mech's dull tone. Prowl knew what he had done. Always had. Jazz suddenly felt the futility of it all come crashing in and was visited by the realization that, in another world, the two of them could have been companions. They could have fought for each other, been an inspiration to each other. Perhaps even… more.

He passed a hand over his faceplates before studying the bike on the berth for a moment, visor glowing an exhausted grey-blue.

"You love 'im."

"Yes. I do," Prowl responded softly. He unshuttered his optics and met Jazz's visor, stillborn smile on his facial plating. "And it made me value my function, selfish though it is. I know you do not understand, Jazz, and I do not expect sympathy, much less from one who has suffered so much. But I do know that you understand that horrible things happen and seem to have no cause—and good things happen with even less cause.

"Both are girded with confusing examples of their opposite. Mixed input. It is hard, to continue in this grey world… to see sense in the greater picture. I have faith that, one solar-cycle, it will be worth it. But if you let me see my partner one last time, Jazz, I will submit to whatever fate you deal me, even execution. I have loved; I can ask no more from my life, and it is not a question of what I deserve. It is a question of what your people deserve. I am willing."

Jazz stared at him for a long moment, venting slowly. Prowl returned the look, expression both brave and beseeching.

It was true. He didn't understand how such a relationship, so twisted, could exist. Even after the proof he had presented, after everything that had happened—even with everything Jazz _knew_ the mech to be—Prowl's only request was to see him. What was the common factor? What was worth fighting for, when so much else seemed wrong? At last, he gave up trying to understand.

"Fine," the older mech said, rising to his pedes. Prowl watched him, visor wide. "Nothin' more to be done."

In the end, there was no use even talking about it. What was done was done, in so many ways.

Jazz clipped the datapad onto his hip and got a crude lock from the wall of the cell—outdated magnet tech—and snapped Prowl's wrists between it. Taking the lock-bar in his servo, he led the bike through the ship, taking back ways and fast-tracks until they stood in front of the ship's prison. Jazz swiped his servo and felt the anxious pulse from the mech behind him, then stepped through.

The first thing either ninjabot saw was a quivering yellow light thrown up on the ceiling. Next, two mismatched servos protruded from the bars of a cell, locked together by stasis cuffs, and a red-plated guard rammed a sizzling shock-stick into a kneeling musclecar's side while another mech watched. The thick grey smoke leaking from the thorny mech's seams made his red optics into embers, barely lit, and Prowl's raw cry echoed in the closed prison.

"Lockdown!"


	64. Grey

A/N: Canon ref, not deus ex machina. Right.

Right?

* * *

Grey

* * *

The guards whipped their shock-sticks away as soon as they heard the scream, bright blue optics glowing through the grey haze like newborn stars. Still the acrid smoke poured from the cell: after Lockdown's weight hit the floor with a dull boom, the only sound in the silent prison was that of seared innards collapsing and quieting with a wheeze of slowing gears. Muted blue tongues of electricity wriggled over Lockdown's black plating.

"Lockdown!" Prowl cried again, sprinting over to the cell and crashing to his knee-plates, sending sparks up. Cursing, the guards scrambled back as if he were contagious in some way--not a delicate, half-ton bike with his wrists still bound, kneeling at the front of a locked cell and molding the limp servos of the bounty hunter around his own and whispering his partner's name again and again and again.

The two guards looked up from the alien sight at the sound of pedesteps, and their facial plating twisted in pure terror at the source. Jazz strode toward them, radiating a fury that cut the stale prison air and the lingering smoke like a white blade. They looked to each other and their weapons shook in their servos as though they craved to drop them, to shrink down to nothing.

"He tried to get out!" the red-plated one blurted out when the Elite was just a few steps away, vocals winding up to a near-shriek. "He's a—an Autobot killer!"

He dropped his shock-stick and just began to turn—to turn and escape, even if it was to run senselessly down the hall of cells—when Jazz's white servos seized him by the front and yanked him aside, slamming him into the bars of an empty cell. Instantly, his hard white frame pinned the guard down, the hiss of his electrical fields turning the young mech's wiring to slag.

"Who ordered you t'do this?" Jazz demanded, but the two mechs only stared at him, petrified. They had no answer. His processor crashed in on itself, rage turning the energon in his lines to vengeful red magma.

"No one on this vessel had any orders to interact with this prisoner, for interrogation or otherwise." When their optics widened and the red one rebooted his vocals, Jazz shook him sharply. "I issued the order personally! Or is this all you?"

"It was some—some Elite!" the red mech eked out at last, shaking madly.

"An Elite on this ship? No Guard outranks me!"

"No sir, Elite Guard Jazz, sir!" His optics were so bright it hurt, and they kept flicking away from Jazz's pure blue visor, facial plating buckling again and again. Jazz could hear the whirr of his cooling fans, the tick of his gears: the chaos of his panicked body. _Guilt_. "He—he put out a notice to all the guards that he'd—give us a—oh Primus, please, sir—

"_You finish it_," Jazz roared, grip only tightening on the guard, who gasped and gave a panicked blip. "I ordered you t'speak, soldier!"

"It was an Elite scientist. He said he'd put out a reward if anyone managed to offline the bounty hunter."

Jazz's helm whipped around, pinning the other guard with a searing stare. The smaller mech, a compact, backed up a pace, very insides struck still by the intensity of it. He ducked his helm, plating just beginning to shake.

"He's non-military, but accessed the guard frequency. Gave us a description and told us to keep it low," he said, gravelly vocals slowing with every word. "Said we'd be… doing the world a favor."

The red-plated mech in his servos pushed as if to stand and Jazz slammed him down again without thinking. The clang and the impact jumpstarted the guard's vocals, high and panicked.

"We are doing the world a favor! He's an enemy of the faction, he's deactivated so… so many of our kind—"

"He's trapped, helpless—and you thought it was honorable to torture 'im? He's in our custody, damnit, that means _protection_!"

"If you let him out, he wouldn't hesitate to offline every one of us," the compact said, vocals tense and chill. "With all due respect, sir, you tell me how that deserves protection."

"Get out," Jazz growled, glaring at the compact for a moment before turning and stiffly tossing the red guard to the side. It was not enough to lay him flat, but the young mech stumbled over his own pedes with a terrified whimper and went crashing to the floor, grasping for his companion. The compact went down on his knee-plates and stayed there, stunned.

Even on the floor, splayed out, the red mech stared up at Jazz—for orders, or, worse, for understanding. Because _he_ knew that Cons were evil. He knew what they had done. More than that, he knew the Autobots were only good.

That cloying, dumb expectation in the air, bright in those young optics and put there by old mechs, made Jazz sicker than he had a word for. He couldn't help bellowing his next order, stabbing a digit towards the door.

"_Get out_, goddamn ya! Both'a ya, and don' ever lemme see you down here again!"

There was an instant scramble down the hallway, but Jazz had turned away, optics shuttered. When the distant door slid shut, Jazz realized he was shaking, Spark weak from a mixture of sickness and defeat. How could an Elite put out such an order—and how could guards be content to follow it for hope of money? How could there be such a horrible want of violence in his own ranks, such desensitization?

What had victory cost them as a people?

"Guess nothing can be black and white anymore…" Jazz murmured to himself, feeling the dark space in his chamber get a little bigger.

Then, refreshing everything he could—processor, vocalizer, stabilizers, optics—the Elite Guard vented deeply and finally turned to face the crime he'd halted. Prowl was still kneeling at the door of the cell, shaking as though he would come apart at the bolts. His digits still fretted at the bounty hunter's limp servos.

Without thinking (but just _feeling_), Jazz bent and unlocked the bike's magnet-cuffs, tossing them aside. Prowl barely seemed to register the motion, only realizing that he was free to stand and yank futilely at the bars of the cell, visor glowing a panicked electric blue.

"Open it. Open it now. Let me see him."

Jazz quick-scanned his servo, thanking Primus for his all-access chip as the door swung open and took the huge musclecar with it. Prowl went to his knees again, bracing the bounty hunter's chest-plating and looking up at the older white mech with a trust so immediate it almost hurt the Elite; Jazz cracked open the stasis cuffs. The huge mech hit the floor with a booming impact. Led by Prowl's servos, he rolled flat with an alarming, heavy slowness, vents huffing futilely, every inch of his plating scorched.

They had been at work on him for megacycles. He was barely online, aspirating sluggishly as pinprick sparks spat every so often from his dark side. Nearly scrap. Jazz's Spark stung at the sight, and the meaning of it.

"Lockdown? Lockdown, please. Can you register me?"

At the sound of his partner's vocals, the bounty hunter stirred, gear click by gear click. Finally, his optics lit again and he saw the small bike above him. He staticked, just a short two-part sound, but the way Prowl gasped made Jazz replay the byte: and what he heard was like a slap to the face.

_Darlin_. The musclecar called the young mech 'darling'.

The bounty hunter's energon-slathered mouth twitched into a rote smirk and he reached for Prowl's servo.

"Told 'em they couldn'… offline me with their little shock-twigs," Lockdown rasped, vocals nothing more than a grating sound. Jazz could smell the faint oily burn that always happened when energon had leaked into an engine. Lockdown's helm eased back with a harsh creaking noise, three functional digits closing around his partner's tiny servo. "Guess I lied."

Seeing the way Prowl's vents caught as he threw himself over the musclecar's crumpled body, clutching as much of his oversized, spiked body close as he could, Jazz had to think: an Autobot and a Decepticon, in love with each other. Devoted to each other. Prowl bent and held Lockdown's strange white face against his blank chassis, clicking and venting in a panic as the other mech slowed in his arms.

"Help him," the bike—the traitor—pleaded, tearing his optics from his dying partner only to look up at him, vocals cracking. "Please, Jazz. I beg you, in the name of what you believe Autobots to be, do not allow him to offline like this."

Unable to help himself, the tall white mech backed up a step, and then another, overwhelmed by the smell of burning casings and acrid carbon emissions. Prowl watched him with an acute horror, looking back and forth between his lover and his enemy and ending with his helm pressed to Lockdown's spiked neck. His servo stayed flush against his partner's chamber plating, tracking the slowing pulse beneath.

"Thass' just wrong. Primus, thass' wrong," Jazz murmured finally, knowing even as he said it that he wasn't speaking of Autobot and Decepticon together, but the forces that had torn them apart.

Then he knelt and put his servo to the hulking musclecar's chamber plating, next to Prowl's, and gathered himself for a scan.

* * *

"Bots have done far worse things in the twilight of war…"

"Like what?" came the steely demand to his right, near the flight controls. "I can't compute anything worse than betraying your entire faction just to save your own sorry skitplates. Much less for a Con."

"Lockdown is a neutral. Has been since the middle of the Great War."

"Once a Con, always a Con. And with what he's done to our kind, he's a neutral even Megatron would have been proud of."

Rodimus looked over at the tall blue Prime, expression both forbearing and sad. The resolution and hatred in Sentinel's tone was iron-bound. He had already made up his processor concerning the one named Prowl and anything associated with him.

The big blue mech never was one for greys, and that was becoming more of a problem these solar-cycles. Bots who stuck to their guns and refused to give ground were invaluable in war, but no one could make a truly informed, Sparkfelt decision based only on an inflexible code that put allegiance first. There were always exceptions. Settling a planet after war required delicacy, not stubbornness. Cybertronians could not live in a fervent wartime mindset when there was peace. It was a costly defense mechanism, not their true racial image.

"Still, this is… inopportune. Disappointing," Rodimus said quietly, looking at the energon cube glowing mutedly in front of him before reminding himself he should be refueling before the next shift came to the bridge. He took it and swallowed without tasting the good mid-grade, feeling the emptiness of the ship around him. His expressive blue optics dimmed to a pained cornflower as he looked out of the bridge's wide windows and the black space beyond.

"Things will be… difficult. I worry that Prowl's case will bring out viciousness in us—a want of revenge, just when we have reached an opportunity to heal."

"Justice needs to be served," Sentinel insisted coldly, turning with a heavy clank to glare at his commanding Magnus and gesturing at the air. "I knew that smear when he was with Optimus. He was never aligned with us. Never.

"He was a fragging draft-dodger, just along for the ride. Optimus shouldn't even have taken him on—you know how many regulations he broke, doing that? That ninjabot might as well have doused his Spark right there. Optimus'. I always said he was an idiot, a fragging _cog_."

Rodimus shuttered his optics and nodded, well-used to such speeches. Some would call it hubris, especially for a member of the Five, but Sentinel missed Optimus. He was angry at him for being gone.

He had feelings for the other mech that he himself likely didn't understand, and Rodimus was fully aware of this: it showed up in the thin condescension he always mentioned the other mech with, the absolute fury Sentinel felt that the other Prime had _managed to offline himself _when he should have survived to lead them. He, like so many others, sensed the missed opportunity. What Optimus could have been.

"Prowl would have been better off as a martyr. With his return, he will destroy so much more than facts," Rodimus said to no one in particular, Spark tightening painfully with the truth of it. "He will destroy a myth that has kept us together for a century."

Unnoticed, several muted security cameras went blank behind the two mechs, who continued to stare into space—their own personal space, each as black and sad as the other—and think about a mech named Optimus Prime.

* * *

Prowl looked back from the smoking security cameras with a tense, stymied expression, Jazz's pistol heavy in his servo as he watched Jazz's own servos press at Lockdown's damaged plating. The air was thick with humming, and the strong, intent vibration gave Prowl relief at the same moment it made him horribly nervous. The otherworldly glow drained from the elder cyberninja's visor as he drew back, then, with a grunt of exertion, heaved the two-ton musclecar to his pedes. Lockdown nearly buckled at the knees, an alarming whorl of black smoke falling from his slack mouth, but Jazz kept him upright, facial plating pinching with the effort. Prowl began to move forward, Spark pulsing horribly fast.

"What are you—"

Bracing the huge musclecar against the wall, Jazz reached up and plugged a small white drive into Lockdown's exposed audio-port. It clicked and gave an affirmative beep, and Lockdown ceased to shake, remaining leaning against the wall even when the white Elite backed away. Jazz grimly tucked the medical device—an anesthetic download, Prowl recognized, just like Ratchet used to have--back into his hip-holster.

"His tensors and struts are still in good shape, looks like, so I jus' blocked his sensor relays. It won' last long. Y'gotta move 'fore he starts feelin' it again."

"And then?" Prowl asked fearfully, not truly understanding what Jazz was doing—or expecting from him. Free though his wrists may have been, he still felt the prison around him: and it was a prison called the Ark, thirty floors deep and countless lengths wide.

Jazz looked almost annoyed that he was asking for an explanation, as though Prowl shouldn't care what would happen on the Autobot ship after he escaped.

"I'll say y'overpowered me and stole my access chip," Jazz said, already fast at work extracting the small upgrade from his carpal plating. Prowl's mouth dropped open when Jazz purposefully punched a digit into the delicate metal, warping the chip-casing and making it look like it was taken by force. "The brigs right next to the dock, and the fast-track is at the end'a this hallway. Your ship is in the dock, confiscated but unlocked. Ain't any active guards there. You're home free, provided you can get on it and get outta here 'fore they realize there's a red alarm under their olfactory receptors."

Jazz held the chip out to him, pushing it into his chest-plating with an angry flare of his visor when Prowl did not move to take it.

"_Go_. Get a move on, damnit."

"But—Rodimus Magnus—" Prowl protested. He was already moving to his partner, chased by the hardness of Jazz's vocals.

"He trusts me," Jazz said, facial plating falling with a weary nausea. "He'll believe me."

Looking at Jazz—realizing his sacrifice--an amazing, painful disbelief absorbed the bike, and Prowl wasted no time forcing himself under Lockdown's arm, unable to feel even his innermost plating for all the wonderful panic in him. Fear meant anything, but panic meant there was a chance at escape. A chance Lockdown would survive.

Bracing every tensor in his body, Prowl took one step, then another, jerking under his partner's weight. Jazz watched, just as tense as Prowl. On the fourth step, Lockdown seemed to be getting the rhythm of walking and hope flared bright and burning in the small mech, pushing him onwards.

But on the seventh step, there was a kind of shivering in Lockdown's numb body, and suddenly all of the old mech's weight was dropped on Prowl, smashing him flat to the floor of the prison with a deafening clang. Pain flared in Prowl's leg where it twisted under Lockdown's girth, hip-spike leaving a deep groove in his cream thigh-plating. He hissed and arched; the old mech nudged tryingly against him, as though he knew Prowl was in pain but didn't have the command of himself to avert it.

"What's wrong now?"

Jazz's vocals came to him, white servos reaching down to help him out from under the musclecar. Prowl's plating squealed horribly against the floor, warning signs flashing in his periphery as Jazz heaved him to his knees.

"His stabilizers are malfunctioning. He cannot walk," Prowl grit out, the full, bloated fear washing over him the moment he struggled to his pedes and saw Lockdown sprawled on the floor once more. What he saw was two immovable tons of black plating, all clustered around an irritated, smug, devious old Spark he valued more than his own function.

Prowl's model was designed so acutely for speed and agility, he was physically incapable of carrying more than his own weight—and that number was a mere quarter of Lockdown's. Lockdown could not move, much less hope to carefully board his own ship in an enemy hanger. Jazz's facial plating blanked horribly, as both ninjabots knew he couldn't help them past this stage. If he were seen assisting prisoners to escape, or even if Rodimus didn't believe his story, it would mean his own imprisonment and trial.

Just from his expression, he didn't know what to do. He had made his contribution, plumbed the extent of his power. Beyond that, he was helpless and the guards were probably already rushing to investigate the blank cameras. His small betrayal would be for nothing.

"Can he transform?" Jazz grit out, bending down to press at the musclecar again, looking hard at his black optics.

"No. No, he cannot."

Prowl hardly felt himself speak. The vivid panic—a kind of burning, welcome horror of offlining that he had lost while in his cell—had turned back on itself and created a black hole inside of him. It pulled at his dense blue Spark, now cowering close to his chamber. Prowl simply stood in the echoing prison, staring at Lockdown's unlit optics.

Jazz was speaking, but the bike did not hear him. It did not matter. They could not get out of this alive. Both of them were fated to offline there. After all of the pain, all of the effort… Lockdown, proud Lockdown, would deactivate in a smear of his own fluids and ash, murdered in his own cell.

"I said you can go, Prowl," Jazz hissed in his audio, shaking his shoulder-plating enough to wake him from his airless descent into himself. "Don't waste a chance like this."

"I cannot," he said quietly, vocals shaking.

"You could still make it."

"_No_."

The thought of their empty ship struck him dumb, filling him with a slow horror that would be so much worse than simply off-lining. Endless solar-cycles floating through black; an empty navigator's chair. Meaningless jobs.

Where was Lockdown's deep, shameless chuckle? Where were the servos on his waist, the content mutterings of a big engine? The ship herself was a ghost, and he would not be haunted for the rest of his function by the mech he left behind. If it would take a coward to flee his own deactivation, it took a different kind of coward to choose deactivation over his own personal daily Pit.

"They're gonna offline you," Jazz said fervently, grip tightening on him. "They may talk for a while, they may swap you from place to place, but you're gonna end up offlined. You got your chance. Go, Prowl, ain't nothin' we can do for him."

"I will not leave him!"

Prowl's vocals cracked, overwhelmed by the crash of helplessness and pure feeling—what Lockdown was to him, and what he would be without him. Nothing. He was _nothing_.

"Without him, there is no reason to escape!"

At that realization—that he was nothing, the same as black space or white light--something snapped inside of him and a clean, cutting urge welled under every piece of his black plating. It crested, sending a terrifying tremor through all of his tiniest mechanisms before suddenly breaking free, beyond wires and metal joints. It felt as though his Spark were expanding through his weak, piecemeal frame like a hissing supernova, reeking of an _end_, and Prowl panicked--but the blue light went outward and didn't leave his center.

He trembled in silence, in the dark of his helm, for a moment, simply trying to feel himself as the center of something. Something large.

Prowl onlined his optics and looked at the blue glow clustered around Lockdown's limp form for kliks before he _saw_ it—and realized Lockdown was suspended two feet above the prison floor. The entire room, the air itself and the molecules within, was vibrating with power. His plating felt like it were hovering a thousand lengths away, rotating slowly in the black space beyond the ship. The glow faded and the absence dazzled and frightened Prowl just as much as the light itself.

Suddenly his optics focused beyond the miracle in front of him to Jazz, who was staring at the spectacle, servo over his Spark.

"Processor… over matter?" he said weakly, then his handsome facial plating twisted in acute disbelief, almost horror. "_You_?"

Alienated from his own mechanics by the push of that light, Prowl began to refresh his vocals, to protest or say how he didn't know what was happening (he was just as scared as he was before, but now in a different way with this unfamiliar power running underneath his plating, encasing him, _pushing_ him towards Lockdown) but Jazz just cut him off and gestured violently.

"_Get out_. Y'heard me, _run_! The ship is in plain sight, you have enough time to go! Both'a you!"

With little more than a thought—an urge, a plea to the energy around him—Lockdown shifted instantly through the air, floating towards him. Prowl took him from the limitless molecules that had borne his weight—everything was aligned, every small part of every big universe worked in one way when touched by the proper frequency—and immediately turned, over-sharp optics falling on the door and re-realizing his escape. The ship would be full. Both of them together.

But before he ran, Prowl looked back at Jazz, called by something greater than himself. He _felt_ the other mech's Spark give a painful twist at the sight of him, lit up with blue, drawing his glow from every star in the galaxy. Jazz wanted it, was terrified of it, envied it, loved it. Prowl pulled Lockdown tighter to his side, wonder and awe clustering around his center again as he thought about what this meant for Jazz—an Autobot Elite, sworn to his people and his cause.

"Why do this?" he asked softly. "Why help us?"

Servos clenching at his sides, Jazz looked at him with a mixture of hatred, regret and sadness. When he spoke, his vocals were raw.

"Like you said, it ain't about what you deserve. It's about what my people deserve—and I ain't about to let their Sparks get broken twice."

A race had wept to lose a hero… but they would die to find him a traitor. Prowl understood. His return would break a myth that had reunited the Cybertronians and kept peace for stellar-cyces. This would become yet another Autobot secret—and finally, one worth keeping.

Prowl nodded and held Jazz's unspeakably sad blue visor for a moment more, somehow struck with an urge to save the other mech and take him into the stars, away from such a disappointment while at the same time knowing (so whispered by the black-white nothing-everything around him) it was his to bear and he would do great things with the determination that came from that sadness. One solar-cycle, Jazz would lead the Autobots, if not in name then in cause.

Then Prowl turned and ran as quickly as he could, thrumming with the new power the universe had given him. He was nothing and he was everything. His visor flashed once as he stepped aboard the fast-track and was immediately sucked through a blue and grey striped tunnel, landing in an abandoned hallway somewhere in the depths of the Nexus.

There was a door to his left, where Jazz said it would be, but it was heavy—perhaps three times as heavy as the mech swaying heavily on his arm. Prowl put his servos out and simply willed a clear path from the depth of his pulsing Spark and the door burst open, white sparks shooting outwards. He didn't waste time with awe. After all, awe itself was already inside of him.

The power was rooted in his Spark, but he could sense that it was fueled by his shattering intensity of feeling—something so heavy he couldn't keep it up for long. Already the halo around him was shrinking, but it was enough to keep Lockdown by his side as he ran through the dark hangar as red lights flashed above, filling the cavernous space with flashes of rust-red threat.

Only three mechanics strewn around the shadowed, thorny underbellies of the Autobot fleet rushed toward him, shouting, and were harmlessly buffeted away by a gust of blue. The sight of Moot sitting quietly in the hangar stirred yet more will within Prowl—_home_--and he opened her up from a full length away, sprinting up her boarding ramp and shutting it behind him with a reluctant crunch of gears. Prowl gently lay Lockdown down by the red windows, the musclecar's full weight returning ounce by ounce as the glow finally left him, draining from the ninjabot's complex, painfully _mechanical_ insides like water.

Prowl checked his partner's dim red Spark before running to the control panel, quick-starting Moot: as if the soft, strong power had protected his audios, in its absence he was suddenly inundated by the frenzied, sharp sounds of engines roaring and filling the small bay, and the shouting of the mechs rioting outside the small ship.

He should have thought of nothing but escape. He should have thought of nothing but getting Lockdown to Tipper as quickly as possible, but the thought of Jazz in the prison, preparing to put himself into artificial stasis and lie upon awakening tugged at Prowl and would not leave him be. He entered Jazz's signature into the ship and searched for him, Spark beating wildly until the ship beeped, opening a channel.

"_What the Pit do you think you're doin'_? You're wastin' time!"

"Never let it happen again," Prowl said, servos still flying over the control panel, screen flashing with the speed of passing submenus. Destination, coordinates, fuel supply. There was a confused spurt of static, more panic from outside.

"What are—"

"The twins. Never let it happen again."

"Ain't your concern," Jazz answered at last, but his vocals held a certain firmness that told Prowl that it would never happen again while Jazz was functioning. The line stayed live for at least another moment before suddenly cutting off, leaving Prowl alone on the deck of the small ship with his partner dying on the floor.

He used the last of the blue hiding under his plating to force open the hangar doors, and the crisp square of limitless black space, framed by the white of the Nexus' dock, never looked so beautiful. He punched Moot to full power, ignoring her baffled chatter at being awoken so suddenly, and they roared into open space, cloaking shield turning them into nothing more than a silky ripple of stars and quietness.

As on Autobot records as in space, Prowl disappeared once again.


	65. Adrift

A/N: Little interrupted (clean) interfacing in the middle, but you'll be able to handle it.

* * *

Adrift

* * *

Prowl aspirated deeply, pulling his legs close to his chest-plating and looking up at the unlit ceiling.

The old paneling was patchy, occasional tufts of wiring sticking out of the neglected creature's innards. Something dripped far away in the cramped, rickety ship, but whether it was from some sort of medical process (distillation, perhaps) or an overturned tin of sour oil in a pile of trash was anyone's guess. Tipper was filthy but he also seemed to know where every piece of garbage or medical equipment was located and kept the latter perfectly sterile. He just preferred floors to shelves for storage space.

In the next room, Prowl could hear the occasional hiss of a blowtorch or the gong-like noise of tools being thrown aside.

It had been many megacycles. He had disabled his chronometer after five, choosing to twist his servos together until he could not feel them any longer rather than count every klik since Lockdown had been put under. Tipper, uncommonly irritated, pushed him out without preamble the moment Prowl stepped close to the medical berth, servo reaching for Lockdown's limp one.

The younger bounty hunter had called Tipper immediately and, despite the other mech's blathering claims of being too busy to take them, located him and executed an autopilot lock on his ship. The medibot _would_ repair Lockdown, and that should have been all that was necessary from Prowl's side. They escaped from impossible odds, _Autobot imprisonment_, what other step could they take toward survival?

But it was megacycles before they would even arrive and the final crisp blue pulse through the ninjabot's plating had left him achingly sensitive. As he sat beside his stasis-locked partner, both bathed in the red-tinted light of the surrounding stars, the slowing and fragmentation of Lockdown's energy fields was like a concentrated drain on his own, driving his Spark to palpitate. Lockdown was dying. He could feel it.

At first, he simply tried not to panic, but an answer came only when he panicked _enough_ to drape himself over Lockdown's chest-plating, clutching the other mech's cold, heavy frame close. Lockdown's Spark slowed some and his energy fields smoothed down to an unsteady hiccup. Then Prowl remembered Jazz's story and the rest was unavoidable.

The only way to keep him online reliably was to do an open-Spark connection and keep feeding life-force into him. Prowl had never done one before--his training ended before he could attempt it with Yoketron--so his servos shook horribly, processor nearly locking from the idea of invading a stasis-locked mech. Lockdown abruptly booted up when the ninjabot's small digits pried delicately into his chamber and the huge mech batted his partner away, energy fields going taut and buzzing in fear. There was such a lack of irritation or anger in it that it frightened Prowl to his core: it was just pure fear, and there wasn't a single emotion Lockdown ever had that wasn't at least vaguely irritated.

"Please, you will offline if I do not do this. _Please_ allow me to do this."

When Prowl unsheathed his own Spark and kneeled over Lockdown's abdominal plating, his swollen center felt the first wisps of _pull_ towards the weak ember in Lockdown's black chest. Then the older mech shoved him away with a braying noise from his motor, either because he was delirious or he didn't, _had never_ wanted Prowl anywhere near his Spark and Prowl had shared that sentiment… until a hundred and three stellar-cycles ago.

His strength, though poor, was enough to keep his injured partner pinned until Prowl leaned over and connected with him. The awesome jolt of power was a perfect whisper to what he had felt on the Autobot warship: the exact same thing, just narrowed down to a beam of light instead of a field of white. Lockdown twitched and twisted and then went still, slack white plating illuminated by the strong, encouraging glow of his partner's Spark, injecting _don't give up, I have you, I need you here_ into his every molecule until the huge musclecar's burned mechanics settled into an even rhythm.

The stressful act nearly stole Prowl's consciousness… and his logic. To feel Lockdown so close yet to know he could not cross the distance—touch him energy for energy, without the cold space air in between diluting it—tempted him to do just that. After nearly losing his partner, he was tempted to simply crush their chambers together and say a merge was necessary for survival, like a twisted version of Sentinel and Jazz. Then, he would finally have what he had always wanted. He would be able to see the truth, finally _see_ everything that his partner was. Feel the reason for the hack, if there was a hack.

That one, ugly thought of the hack kept him from it, along with all the wavering defenses he had built up over the centuries–because it wasn't the first time such thoughts had occurred when temptation came regularly enough to turn anyone insane.

_His entire frame was warm to the touch; the space-chilled energon Lockdown playfully painted down his front had long-evaporated and he couldn't keep his aspirations from coming short and sharp. He couldn't keep from twisting in his partner's huge servo, one dug firmly around his aft while the other rubbed haltingly between his parted thighs. They were both nearly paralyzed by the heavy circuit of yellow energy buzzing between them, chambers cracked as usual—then suddenly the warm, erotic dark was chased away by a brilliant blue flood of light, crackling with a swollen glory that made the older mech stare, red optics flickering madly. _

_Prowl's chamber lay completely open, any metal lines completely overwhelmed by blue-white rapture._

_There was a fine line by which they managed to keep their chambers closed every time. The temptation, at least for the physical pleasure of it, was always there, but at least one of them was aware enough of the consequences in the heat of the moment to pull back at the right time, ending it._

_But after three centuries of such closeness, of functioning as though either 'bot was the other's primary servo, what consequences were left? What closeness was left to be risked when they functioned so completely as a unit, totally aware of each other's thoughts at any given time? Was it the commitment, when a shallow merge would take a century to fade… and they had already spent three times that in one another's arms? _

_Prowl wanted to be submersed; he wanted to _become_ his partner for a brief second and then part with a reddish imprint on his Spark, a ripple in his energy signature that was purely Lockdown._

It was the moment he had brazenly been half-planning for stellar-cycles, all in rare snatches of such insanity: when his desire would flare and crash with his need and logic—repercussions, professionalism—would be rendered nothing more than dumb code. He would do this, and then it would be done. Rant as Lockdown may, they would be connected and he would see what it was to be one with another creature.

The fear would dissolve, superstitions banished by the calming frequency between them. He would see. Then, they could Sparkbond and nothing would be able to separate them. Nothing.

"_I want to be with you. Only you," Prowl whispered into his partner's audio, his staticky vocals barely audible over the wanting hiss of his Spark. "Please, Lockdown."_

_Feeling the jolt of desperation, the ninjabot pressed his chassis to his partner's, burying his helm in the other mech's thick neck. His every electrical component keened to pass the inches of metal separating him from his Sparkmate; it was the red-screened moment before overload but frozen, and the intensity was almost painful. _

_The pull of Prowl's beautiful white-blue Spark was horribly overwhelming, crushing the musclecar where he lay; Lockdown's very tensors trembled as if he was being held back by an invisible force, fighting even to vent air. Prowl could _feel_ his partner's Spark responding, he could feel it mirroring his in size and frequency and urgency and pure _want_, but suddenly the connection was shattered and the shock of cold black space left him with three nanokliks of a rough white screen of visual feed. _

_When he rebooted, he was on the floor of Lockdown's chamber, where the huge mech had thrown him. His partner was venting heavily, gears whining, on his pedes with one arm against the wall and the other against his chamber._

_First, processor crawling from the energy jolt, Prowl had to understand what had happened between being on the berth and being on the floor. The idea of Lockdown striking him hurt him instantly, even as he had not felt it. Then he saw the other mech's face—drawn, hurt, almost panicked—and the reality of the cold, small room and the cold, endless space around him set in._

_It was cowardly, selfish, to try and force it on him when he was helpless. Lockdown always trusted him to be the smarter one. He had abused that trust. _

_When Lockdown turned slightly and the dull red shard of his optic caught his partner's visor, Prowl felt a gush of shame chill him and tried, helplessly, to scrape up the last vestiges of what Lockdown would want him (_him,_ the professional, logical, sane partner) to say._

"_I am… I apologize. I had no right."_

_It sounded hollow and weak, just like his frame. Forcing himself to stop shaking, Lockdown breathed out and straightened himself, optics half-lit and thinned._

"_No," he growled as though from a broken vocalizer. The line of his back was defeated before it stiffened in anger and he slammed his fist against the wall, calling strength from somewhere unknown to carry him out of the room and away from his crouching partner. _

"_No, y'didn't."_

In the back of Tipper's ship, Prowl sat back and fought the urge to curl up and insulate his weak center from the painful memory. Afterwards, Lockdown hadn't spoken to him for solar-cycles. Being merged wasn't going to be any sort of magical turning in their relationship. He felt a sick kind of relief that he hadn't given into the urge, but nothing would change the fact that Lockdown would only ever see it as a loss of control, which only hurt him more.

The thought of Lockdown, once more alive in his memory-banks, left him incapable of waiting any longer. The scraggly orange medibot glanced back when Prowl entered his workshop, but did not move to push him out, so the ninjabot came closer, worrying afresh over how the operation kept stretching out longer and longer as Tipper found yet more complications that resulted from such extensive shocks. He was forced to make many replacements instead of just repairs. Moreover, Cybertronians were more than the sum of their parts: besides the acute injuries, Lockdown's general system exhaustion had to be considerable.

"He took a big hit," Tipper remarked dully when Prowl came into sight, magnifiers clicking in and out of focus as the medibot picked at the last of the seared wires in Lockdown's leg. The giant was still out cold on his table, Spark pulse measured at a wobbly 760 herz on the monitor behind him. "He's old as sin in the first place and this doesn't help. He's going to deactivate sooner rather than later."

"But he is online," Prowl countered, vocals hard.

Tipper blinked, plating giving a muted shrug. He had never had to deal with Lockdown's partner alone, so things weren't the coziest between them. Not only that, it was strange seeing the bike without his modifications—he looked tiny, almost harmless. Very _Autobot_.

"Just warning you."

"I have no wish to focus on anything but now."

They would not be threatened by the future.

Lockdown was far older than he. It had always been a factor in their relationship. Prowl would be left alone one solar-cycle: but that solar-cycle was not today. Uncaring of the other mech watching him—uncaring of anything else—Prowl bent and pressed his helm to the big mech's chamber, humming very softly, trying not to let his fear come through.

The frequency alone—_his_—made Lockdown's spark cease to flutter. It evened out to a strong 800 herz, something Tipper had been shooting for for megacycles. The medibot squinted behind him, then looked over at the small bike, green optics suddenly bulbous and inquisitive.

"So he really didn't."

Prowl looked up. Tipper stared at him, scratched magnifiers clicking in a decidedly confounded way, then continued as though it made further sense, "You're clean."

"Explain," Prowl said shortly, deep exhaustion taking over his every component once he had allowed himself to accept Lockdown's status. He had not recharged since they escaped from the Elite Guard.

"He never re-wrote you or anything, after he picked you up. Because… I don't know a single programmer who can pull that off."

"What?"

As if pricked, Tipper immediately turned back to picking at wires, expression strangely flustered. He picked and thought and grumbled and looked for a word that wasn't the word he had to say, cowed by Prowl's mercilessly direct gaze, then finally muttered,

"Love."

* * *

Lockdown was soon safe in Moot once again, laid out flat on his huge berth. A sizable chunk of Prowl's credit had ensured it. The ninjabot finally fell into recharge, seeing no reason to power down anywhere but right next to his restored partner, but he set himself to reboot a megacycle before Lockdown awakened. He spent that quiet time pressing close and waiting for the slow humble chug of gears. When they began, Prowl's Spark finally expanded, shuttering his optics and feeling his partner in all of his parts as he came back to the world of the living.

"Darlin'."

It was a statement, not a question, and nothing could have made Prowl happier. The ninjabot pressed close, engine giving a reflexive, relieved purr when Lockdown's arm clumsily draped itself over his middle. Something caught deep in the bigger mech and he coughed, rough vocals wavering.

"How the… Pit'd we get outta there?"

"I am uncertain myself," Prowl admitted, more than unwilling to speak of the experience so soon. He did not understand it himself. He could still clearly recall the fear of being captured and the following hopelessness: when combined with the crash of the impossible, what had _happened_ to him, it was too intense. To chase it away and bring himself back to the present, he put a servo on Lockdown's scratched chest-plating.

"How do you feel?"

"Your mods," Lockdown rasped in answer, optics refocusing as if confused by his diminished silhouette, the lack of slicing golden horns.

"Confiscated," Prowl said softly, tracing a digit around Lockdown's piteously flickering optics. "I will manage."

Lockdown drifted in and out for the next few cycles, getting a rein on all of his mechanics as Prowl spoke softly to him about nothing, lending him heat as his frame slowly warmed. He had indeed taken a very large hit and it showed. But he would manage as well.

They always did.

Prowl coaxed a chuckle out of the larger mech after a while, but gradually Lockdown grew quiet and somber, as if something was making itself clearer and clearer to him as he came into himself and he couldn't help but face it. When Prowl asked him what it was, Lockdown dropped his suddenly muted red optics, quiet down to his last gear.

"S'pose they scanned you."

His tone was so weak and defeated, so quietly fearful, that Prowl simply looked at him, insides contracting under a slow, deadly squeeze. He nodded. At last, Lockdown aspirated and shuttered his optics.

Without any preamble, the musclecar told him everything. Struggling to keep it to facts, Lockdown recounted his first capture on the nameless planet, the slave circuit, Anicon, the rescue, and the slow, horrible time afterwards where the memories came back and destroyed him. He went all the way up to the hack, finishing with the lies he told to cover it up.

Prowl retreated inside of himself with shock. There was a long silence after he finished, both mechs emitting a dead, stunned buzz. It was simply too much, and simply too fast, in so many ways.

It sounded like a story. Somebody else's story. How could he have gone through so much and remained intact? It sounded like an alien landscape, especially the freakish tale of he and Anicon, the quiet, seemingly harmless botanist with an equally harmless preoccupation. He felt violated not that it had happened but that he could not remember it.

But there was one unshakable truth.

He and Lockdown had merged—and the bike could not remember even that. The very thought murdered him as it should have while on the Autobot warship. Prowl was so shaken, he could not bring himself to ask the obvious, poisonous questions (basic, aching things like _how could you_ and _why did you lie_ that would have no answer), and so he focused on that. That one thing he had wanted for so long and had been denied. Ripped from him by a hack paid for by the very mech he was merged to.

"And merging," he said in an entirely too-calm tone, vocals disconnected and hollow. "How did you fare?"

Plating shifting inwards, Lockdown just ducked his helm, both solemnly and regretfully. His silence said all. His expression finalized everything Prowl had always suspected.

Prowl looked at him, uncomprehending—dying _not_ to comprehend—then gave a weak, weak smile and slid off of his partner's berth, servo pressed to his front. Lockdown shifted with several ugly scraping noises and watched his small partner retreat, but did not dare to call his name, knowing he had just denied the bike something very special in addition to his original betrayal.

Prowl remained utterly quiet for solar-cycles, optics turned inwards. The ship herself remained deathly silent as if in deference to his Spark-deep confusion and hurt. Lockdown did not attempt to touch him, no matter how strong the urge, nor did he try to explain himself further: he knew he had spoken his piece.

Everything else was up to Prowl… and how terrifying it was, to stake everything--_everything_ his function had become and would ever be--on another 'bot.

At last, Prowl asked to land on a large asteroid in the middle of a two-sunned galaxy. It was an odd time for Prowl's love of nature to surface, but when the ninjabot walked outside and found the highest crag and sat down, cream legs folding up with a slow, surreal finality, Lockdown's substructure clenched. He accessed his comm.

_Kid_? he rasped uncertainly, lingering by Moot's airlock in something of a blind wish. Prowl looked up at the sun, light glinting off his golden chevron.

_I need to be alone_.

Lockdown stared, trying to understand what he meant. His tired Spark gave a painful hiccup.

_For how long?_

_I do not know_, Prowl responded dully, making Lockdown's fledgling anxiety rise hard and sharp. _Please leave_.

The finality of Prowl sitting on the rock, his shadows fusing with the shadows of the rock like he was just another structure on that lonely asteroid, made Lockdown go a little crazy.

Prowl wanted him to leave-leave. Not just go back inside and wait, but pack up and go, leaving him to the mercy of open space just a few dozen solar-cycles after their escape. The bounty hunter wanted to boot up his vocals and defy the laws of space and growl that he didn't give up so much, _go through so much Pit_ just to have Prowl quietly walk out on him, but he knew he wasn't in a position to say anything. That and it was just the anger talking. The fear of an empty ship, all over again. The black of space seeped into his insides, weighing him down and emptying him at the same time.

Lockdown went inside, got a few cubes of energon and put them at the foot of the ninjabot's small mountain. It was just three, at first—if Prowl ran out, he would call for help sooner—but then Lockdown went back in for another armful, warm pink glow underscoring the conflicted twist of his tattooed plating.

Prowl neither looked at him nor thanked him, aqua visor facing the chilling emptiness of black space without flinching.

_Call me when you need me_, Lockdown said to the rocks, receiving nothing but the soundless clockwork shift of planets in response. He glanced over his spiked shoulder when the airlock closed with a hiss, closing off something else inside his spiked exostructure. Lockdown stayed with his back to the door for a small eternity, then forced himself to go to the bridge and lower himself in his navigator's chair, bringing the engines online and lifting into space alone.

Fifty stellar-cycles later, there still was no word.


	66. Two Parts

A/N: Prowl is only about 500 years old in Partners (Lockdown being like 46,000, and both should be multiplied by 100 to account for RIDICULOUSLY long-lived robotic beings canon) but I still have to account for the many years in between Yoketron dying and Prowl going with OP's crew. My excuse is that meditation, specifically the kind that Prowl was doing in ye old little asteroid, shouldn't count as function since it's technically kind of a stasis.

If you were a 3000-year-old Cybertronian and you'd spend half of that asleep/in a coma, you've only _lived_ 1500 years. (PSSSST that's Torque's secret: lots and lots of sleep. MILLENIA of sleep.)

* * *

Two Parts

* * *

They sat by themselves in a dark oil bar, like old times—and, just like old times, there wasn't much to say.

"He will come back."

"You don't sound like you believe it," Lockdown muttered, optics unfocused as he took another gulp of high-grade. He wasn't so far gone that he was incapable of tasting anything, but still the energon was tepid and muddy-tasting against his sensors. If he drank more, it just got worse.

Same thing with jobs. Same thing with weapons. Anytime he got a bounty (how strange it was to suit up by himself in an empty ship and return to one), he just tossed them in the holding cell and forgot about them. Even if they had mods, new and glossy, he couldn't bear to put a digit on them, because Prowl wouldn't have liked it. Prowl never liked him stripping mechs and femmes and, somehow, the thought of hurting Prowl when he wasn't even there made him a hundred times more uncomfortable than if he were present.

It had been decades. Multiple decades. After all that time, _maybe tomorrow_ loses strength. Rational cause-and-effect decays and a chronometer becomes useless. Like a child abandoned, Lockdown somehow believed that if he behaved as Prowl might have liked, that the small ninjabot would return to him.

"You're right. I don't believe it," the other hunter answered softly, one servo on the musclecar's back. Lockdown looked over at her, red optics dimmed hopelessly.

Torque knew better than most how badly he had hurt Prowl. She knew how young the ninjabot was—how inflexible the hypertexts seemed at that age, less of the metaphor for reverence that they were and more of crystalline laws. She forced herself to smile; it was a poor try, and Lockdown looked away immediately, beastly facial plating contracting.

"But I'm hoping anyways. You should hope, too."

"Can't," he said, shuttering his optics against the buzzing neon all around him. "Too tired."

"Drink," she said, nudging his high-grade closer to him. She watched him as he sat and didn't drink, yellow optics lingering on his pained expression. She had no doubt that same look continued in his dark ship, where he was all alone. Not even considering what trouble Moot must have been giving him, with her friend gone once more. Torque vented thickly, taking a drink of her oil.

"You never know, darling. You just don't. He might find it in himself to forgive you."

"You wouldn't," Lockdown said dully, rubbing his servo over his white face.

"I know. But Prowl is different from me."

"He ain't a coward."

"Exactly," she said, vocals soft as she continued to run her digits up and down his thorny back. Challenging one's own dearly-held ideals instead of just _running_ from the pain took a great amount of strength. Perhaps Prowl had that strength, perhaps he didn't. Until then, they waited.

* * *

Sixty two stellar-cycles, fourteen solar-cycles and three megacycles after he left Prowl on the asteroid, Lockdown got the call.

It was not a call but a beacon. It was wordless, which could have been the worst thing or the best thing. The bounty hunter was in the middle of a drink in a dirty, neon-polluted bar when the clear signal pinged up through his arm and straight to his processor.

He didn't even stop to throw back the rest of his high-grade, or wait for the weapons dealer he'd arranged to meet with. He ran out and was rising into the black sky within cycles, the rumble of Moot's engines shaking his center.

* * *

Lockdown walked out onto the asteroid, eerie quiet of space insulating him all around. Eternity stretched out before him, ignored. A crisp new blue-white star glowed a few light-years away, casting a milky sheet of light over the lifeless rock. Lockdown looked around the hostile landscape, already wondering—as he had for the two megacycles it took him to get to the rock—if Prowl hadn't signaled him accidentally, or if he wasn't just finally malfunctioning to the point where he imagined a signal.

His Spark quit pulsing entirely when one of the shadows moved and a butterfly-blue visor lit up, staring out at him out of the stone. Prowl rose gracefully, long face unreadable, emerging into the watery light as the beauty he was. No hologram could do his frame justice, though Primus knew Lockdown had tried to make do with the few images he had saved over the stellar-cycles. The way he looked, gold and black and tan and tiny, Lockdown wanted to take a still-frame every other klik, never to be without evidence that Prowl was—or had been at one time—his.

Prowl walked up to him and kept walking until they were chassis-to-chassis, then put his servo on the musclecar's front. He kept it there and simply stared, seemingly unaware of how _still_ Lockdown was above him. At last, he removed his servo.

_It is gone._

Prowl's vocals were pure rapture in his helm, cool and distant. Lockdown's substructure tightened at his first cryptic words—could their joint existence have just evaporated for him on that cold rock?—but he realized, with the careful infiltration of Prowl's fields, that there was utter electric silence between them. Prowl was talking about the last remnants of the merge.

_Yeah. It was a… quick merge. Shallow. Made sure of it._

Then, because he could say no more and wait no more, Lockdown simply looked down at him expectantly, desperately. Waiting for the verdict of a jury he didn't understand or trust. At last, Prowl bowed his helm. Lockdown could see his vents dilate in an unheard sigh.

_I once meditated for two thousand stellar-cycles. It was just after my master was murdered. My existence was… angry before I came to him. It was violent and pointless, full of antagonism and unacknowledged loneliness. Yoketron was the first mech I ever trusted. He brought me peace, gave me purpose and faith, and then he doubled my anger by leaving. I could not comprehend it. I learned nothing from my optics quest but what I had returned too late to avert: that goodness is rarely rewarded and everything ends._

Prowl shook his helm, unaware of Lockdown's wary, almost fearful expression.

_I retreated from everything I had ever known and hid on an asteroid much like this. That is what it was, I realize. Hiding. I sat and tried to meditate as he had taught me, to grow by myself, but in reality all I did was brood. I recapped my master's deactivation over and over, further convincing myself that I could not face the idea of more disappointments. Of loving another creature and then being forced to part from them. I was terrified. Angry at the very universe for continuing to turn. Very, very angry._

He spoke the last part with such aching regret that Lockdown fought the urge to touch him or steady him. He didn't. The huge musclecar stayed right where he was, looking at Prowl look inside of himself, and thought that all he had ever done was bring Prowl pain--even before they met.

He hadn't meant to offline Yoketron. Beat him within an inch of his function, yes, but he hadn't wanted to end the old mech. The very thought of his master had always brought up a sharp clench of his insides that he'd long hidden with anger, but did it mean anything that he would apologize to the ancient mech now if he could? Would even Yoketron understand why he had done what he'd done and what had driven him to it?

It was the one thing he could never tell Prowl, even as the little bike's audios had once heard the confession. Fear filled the big mech as he remembered once again _what he had done_. But if Prowl came back to him, maybe he could make up for it. Maybe he could prove he deserved the other mech and shape up. Make Yoketron—wherever he was—believe it was all for a reason.

Prowl shook his helm slightly, staring off to their right, where a big orange moon crept by, riding the invisible tide of gravity: the breath of the universe.

_Now, like then, meditation offered nothing. If anything, I am yet more confused about what is wrong and what is right… without someone to lead, it is a circular path. Equal parts maddening and enlightening. It was simply my thoughts, over and over. Not enough to come to a logical conclusion. Not enough to be sure that any one path is the correct one._

Lockdown tensed, almost certain that dull sentence was going to be the last thing he heard before Prowl quietly asked him to take him to another planet and never speak to him again, never _think_ of him again. But Prowl aspirated deeply, contemplating not his partner's blank sigil but the distance between him and that sigil, then looked up.

_What I hope is that the universe has a plan. I hope that somehow, Yoketron was meant to deactivate when he did. What I want is to better myself. What I need is peace. But what I _know_, what I cannot escape, is that my function as I have known it and dissected it, past present and future… is as pointless as hating the universe itself if I am not with you._

Prowl reached forward, up, and touched Lockdown's facial plating, running his digits over the black markings hooking outward from his optics. The old musclecar's processor caught up with the soft words the moment Prowl smiled at him. The simple expression incited a full-body pulse in his tall frame, almost bringing him to his knees for the sheer improbability of it. The bike's expression was hurt, admittedly, and would take time to recover into an easy, demure smirk, but it was a beginning. Prowl was with him.

Lockdown pushed out all the air remaining in him and cupped the ninjabot's servo to his facial plating, nosing into it. He was crushingly thankful for the silence of space: his motor was free to choke, his processor was free to _break_ and all Prowl saw was the intensity of his expression, maroon optics half-shuttered.

After a moment, Prowl put his other servo on his partner's front. The touch was light, almost nonexistent, but Lockdown instantly froze. Prowl's visor angled, expression now freely sorrowful.

_I only have two questions. When you had me hacked, did you intend to harm me, frame or Spark?_

_No_, came the knee-jerk of an answer, wringing a physical twitch from Lockdown. Prowl studied him intently, blue of his visor soft but unreadable.

_Why did you do it?_

_Fer you. Did it to help you._

That was all he needed to hear. The singularly helpless roughness in the other's vocals proved what Prowl had suspected all along, after the first decade of sitting in helpless silence: Lockdown gave up so much money, the most important thing in his function, not to free himself but to save his partner. It represented a breaking, the final unselfishness and the highest selfishness, either of which can only be borne from love.

When two sentient beings with different beliefs clash, when should those laws be surrendered? When the other is broken and incapable of thriving? Is it considered selfish to cling to beliefs when a being's own destruction is damaging the lives of everyone around it? A horrible thing still happened and that would never change—but, in some small part, Prowl was able to forgive the bounty hunter, and that was what he needed to continue in his function. Anything else would be self-detonation.

Scan past my mechanics and diagnose my intent. Scan the light that animates me, not the pulleys, gears and wire. The hypertext spoke of it and Prowl had had much time to look them over for guidance. Lockdown did all he could to save him from a terrible function. He did all he could, did it for _him_, and that sentiment was the beautiful one. That was the Spark of his companion, not the tools he misused to do it. Prowl could not judge for himself how horrible the life was, but he trusted Lockdown's judgment.

What was more, the old Lockdown would have done the same thing without hesitation, without regret. This Lockdown, the one that bent and rumbled _m'sorry darlin' _as his servo carefully curled around his waist, had nearly destroyed himself to do so. He was not the only one hurt by this.

Somehow, there was a sense of progress, a sense of better things coming. Even as it hurt, the universe continued to move forward. Let it go, the constancy of the stars seemed to say, all will pass. The comfort Prowl felt pressing himself to his partner's chest plating made him weak in the Spark at the same time it made him whole: he could no longer survive in solitude. There would always be a gap where Lockdown was not, and to say anything else was denial.

Prowl held his partner tightly until some of the ache went away, soothed by the insistent, overcome growl of the bigger mech's motor against his chassis. Lockdown held him as if worried he would be stolen away by the vacuum of space all around them; Prowl eventually pushed him away, looking up into the musclecar's twisted expression, the trying burn of his optics.

_Thank you for waiting, Lockdown, _he said softly. Lockdown snorted silently and shook his helm, vocals thick and rough and overwhelmed.

_I'd wait a million stellar-cycles for you, darlin'._

Lockdown's chin came down on the top of his helm as he pulled the small bike close again, claw mod clicking gently against Prowl's golden tank.

_I'd wait for you even if you never came._


	67. Need

A/N: Technically a droubble, but 200 words are all that's necessary. Technically, only 3 words.

* * *

Need

* * *

"I need you."

Prowl began to turn around, then stopped. His visor was fixed motionlessly on the glow of the main screen and the green figures there. He heard Lockdown's plating scrape; his gravelly vocals were tense.

"Y'know that."

_I need you_, he said one solar-cycle, because it was the farthest thing from the truth.

For a mech of his cast, uncompromised and basic, need was a purely visceral word, limited to energon, oil, money: physical things that, in one way or another, prolonged his function and the grind of his innards. Tiny Prowl was none of these things, but the bounty hunter couldn't hide himself behind any amount of gruff, ingrained dissembling, or even his dear silence. Not after so much life with the bike.

He had survived before Prowl had come along, with these needs met: but that was all.

Prowl knew what the ancient mech was saying. He had waited to respond for millennia. He turned to look over his shoulder-plating, vocals soft, and allowed himself a small smile.

"And I, you."

"Good," his partner said after a long, long silence, and they returned to their respective tasks, each as wordless as their devotion to one another.


	68. Definition of Winner

A/N: No more missions, but you can take it from me that things have changed. The two only take on jobs that Prowl agrees with and they've started doing things better. Lockdown only takes weapons, not modifications. I'm sorry I couldn't think up ways to show it, but they are trying to do right (or at least _neutral_) in whatever small ways they can.

In which Lockdown shows how much of an immature teenager he can be while still being a crotchety old man. D'aw.

* * *

Definition of Winner

* * *

Lockdown rose from running his servos over the creamy-smooth stretch of road, stepping back until he was even with Prowl. The two of them had had an appointment on the planet and then afterwards, at Prowl's urging, wandered further for a drive in the short-grassed country. The blueish rise of road had caught them off-guard, provoking an immediate transformation and a thorough investigation.

"Nice track. Reminds me of Velocitron."

"You have traveled there?"

"Once or twice."

"The quality certainly makes sense, then."

Lockdown looked over at him expectantly. Prowl nodded to himself, visor abnormally bright in the way that indicated he was accessing a wireless connection at high-speeds.

"It was formed by a native Velocitronian. Apparently racing never took off here and it fell out of commission. The road is still quite smooth," Prowl commented, then gestured at the extensive ribbon of concrete. "We may as well make use of it."

"Not often you can put rubber to a track this tight," Lockdown growled with relish, stepping forward to rake his ridged pede against it if just to hear the scrape of the special sealant blend so prized by Velocitronians.

He was a musclecar, built for speed. Unfortunately, there was rarely the right environment for him to show off and put his pedal to metal. He spent most of his time racing over lumpy terrain in pursuit of some poor soul and he'd swapped suspension to suit.

Lockdown wouldn't run as impressively as he would have when he was first protoformed, true, but he was still tailored for performance. His engine revved in anticipation; he didn't bother to hide it and Prowl's prim little mouth twitched into a smirk.

"Shall we make a bet of it?"

"You know me and gamblin', kid," he said, barely honoring the bike with a sideways glance. "What's the bag?"

"We race. Five laps," Prowl suggested with professional calmness. "The winner can make one demand of the other. One service, no guidelines or restrictions."

"Sounds dangerous," Lockdown growled appreciatively after a moment. His engine gave another woof, this time decidedly more sultry.

"If I were not aware of the effect that danger has on you, Lockdown, I would be a poor partner indeed," Prowl said with (his version of) a wry drawl. "Do you accept?"

Lockdown nodded at length, grinning dirtily as Prowl transformed. He admired the ninjabot's sleek alt form, then thumbed at the track when the bike's wheel swiveled expectantly.

"I'll give ya a five nanoklik head start."

"Brash," came Prowl's dislocated vocals. Lockdown preened, flashing his gap again.

"You don't know the half of it, ninjabot."

"If only that were true," Prowl sighed. The bike's headlights dimmed in an almost suffering manner, but he took off regardless. Lockdown waited until the bike was obscured by a cloud of dust—the track was covered in it, after so much neglect—with no mind for nanokliks, then transformed with a guttural noise and plowed after his partner, grinning deep inside his altmode the moment his rubber hit road.

* * *

The race began fast and Lockdown easily gained ground on Prowl with the merciless turn of his thick tires, but suddenly Lockdown caught sight of his partner in his review mirror, taking an off-ramp that he had missed. Velocitron tracks were about so much more than simple speed: there were multiple paths (some that looked like shortcuts but would infact take longer) and hidden detours, and navigation and wit were more than standard requirements.

Lockdown thought he knew the track well enough by that point—third lap—that he revved on, fairly purring at the feeling of his tires thrumming over that smooth path, tight and cool. Eating it up. But he didn't see Prowl for a lap, then glimpsed him for another. He, being Lockdown, assumed he was in the lead and that he had either lapped Prowl or the other was far behind him.

The finish line was in sight. The old musclecar felt his energon supply flagging slightly as he sped up, still wanting to thrash Prowl by at least a few _cycles_ in track-time—but Prowl was actually right in front of him. The tiny ninjabot was sitting on the edge of the track in his mech form, about three spans _before_ the finish line that Lockdown zoomed past with a shocked screech.

Prowl only rose when Lockdown skidded and nearly did a 360, brake spazzing in shock. He transformed too quickly, stumbling slightly as the momentum stuck with him, mouth already open wide.

"How—_what_? What the Pit was that?" he roared, pointing at the finish line like it was personally responsible for whatever had happened. Prowl dusted his black plating off, long face unreadable.

"You bested me. How disappointing."

"You—no way." Lockdown squinted at him, disbelief gaining enough momentum to make a fantabulous crash when it finally hit his processor. "No way. You ain't allowed to do that."

"Lose?" Prowl inquired too politely, tilting his helm.

"Rematch. Fraggin' rematch, right here!"

Lockdown wasn't trying to hide the heated, taxed grind of his mechanics, mistaking them for the side-effects of outrage: his victory had been handed to him, or snatched away, by a smug, self-entitled, backwards little brat and he was no such idiot to take it. Prowl, the aloof philanthropist that had no need for victory to soothe his ego, approached him with a smile that bordered on coy, unconcerned with his partner's close-fisted rage.

"I apologize. Allowing you to win was unfair and dishonest."

If Lockdown's hackles rose at that, he was in for it when his partner's visor flashed almost evilly.

"I simply grew impatient and doubted your ability to keep up without abusing your mechanics."

"Why you—little--!" Lockdown punched at the air, engine giving a single outraged snarl, then pointed at his partner, optics blazing. "You're gonna pay for that mouth."

"How so?" he asked mildly. Lockdown puffed up, fairly honking steam from his vents.

"Get your cocky aft back on the pavement, kid, we ain't done here!"

"I won't permit it."

"What're you, Primus?" Lockdown demanded snottily.

"I am only thinking of your health," Prowl replied, expression waxing 'disgustingly conscientious'. "One race is surely enough. What if you were to slip a rod?"

"And what if I left your sorry aft here, huh?"

"Then it would be a very sad solar-cycle indeed," the bike admitted solemnly, then emitted a short double-blip to get his partner's attention. Lockdown gave it, if grudgingly (with a metric ton of resentment). Prowl smiled. "Lockdown, I believe you have missed a very integral part of this situation: you won. Our deal still stands."

It was out of the blue. A right 180. Lockdown's processor jerked to a halt, drained of rage, then he glared anew at his partner. He tried to puzzle through—rip through—Prowl's blank visor and hint-bare mouth, looking for answers to this mess.

"You're bein' a right little glitch today," he growled at last, expression deeply suspicious. "What do you want? Why'd you throw it?"

"In all honesty? Because I have the utmost of faith in your processor."

When Lockdown only glared at him, Prowl smiled silkily, walking—_slinking_--up to his far larger partner.

"I'm afraid I am far less imaginative than you are, much less after your patience has been tested. If the culmination of this bet was to end in a service, I thought it best to leave the devious demands to a professional."

Suddenly, it all made sense in a way Prowl's nonsensicalness only could. Lockdown stared at him, then shook his helm, all of the tension suddenly leaking out of him with a grungy, _why-the-Pit-didn't-I-see-that_ chuckle.

"You're a walkin' malfunction, ninjabot."

"I am efficient and easily pleased, if a bit… particular." Prowl corrected him smugly, looking up at him with his visor half-lit into a velvet teal. Slowly, with the same relish with which Lockdown had stroked the track, his servo scraped down Lockdown's front. "I did not want to disappoint you by winning and requesting little more than assistance with the next barnacle-scraping in the new stellar-cycle. I do not believe I could resist such a functional service, but I am in the mood for something… different at the moment."

"You threw it 'cos you got impatient, huh?" Lockdown said, chuckling deeply as Prowl pushed him insistently enough—never violently, more like a silky but unshakable nudge of a feline—that he fell back onto the ground. Prowl then slunk onto his lap, one servo already teasing a neckspike.

"I never said in what fashion," Prowl said mischievously, plating far too warm to attempt innocence. Lockdown burst out laughing, loud and satisfying.

Work had been constant lately. No time for the berth, and it had obviously been driving Prowl insane--Lockdown couldn't have been more pleased to know it, or to feel it. The kid's Spark was fairly growling at his own, banging insistently on the metaphorical door of his chamber plating—perhaps it had even gone so far as to check around the rest of the house for unlocked windows.

This direct, minxy Prowl was rare as Pit, but he never just settled for interfacing. There had to be some sort of intellectual tussle first. Something to get him excited. Slag, Lockdown was practically bonded to a puzzle-box.

"Your chamber that tight, kid?"

"Only with your lamentable conditioning," Prowl snorted, then looked at him seductively, as though daring the wild musclecar to make his impatience worthwhile. He rose to his knees, one on either side of Lockdown's wheel-girded hips, and dragged his talented servos around the musclecar's thick neck. "Make your demands of me, partner."

Lockdown, still chuckling, pulled the bike until they were scraping chassis then gave him a quick swat on the aft; Prowl jerked and his engine made a growling sound that bordered between cautionary and lusty. His servos toyed with the chinks in Lockdown's neck plating, rubbing the way he knew the musclecar loved.

"Fine," Lockdown growled, optics narrowing predatorily. Something inside his partner pulsed, and he could guess what. He grinned. "I got your demand. A race."

Visor widening with a shocked blip, Prowl's purely dismayed expression was one for the books. Lockdown grabbed him yet closer, before he could balk (or betray himself and his cockeyed ninja morals by whining for the jarring, dirty interfacing he so adored), continuing:

"You and me, back to the ship. Doesn't matter who gets there first, but if I catch you on the way, we 'face right there."

_That_ was an entirely new expression. Lockdown snapped a shot and downloaded it to his banks before Prowl started sputtering.

"But—how--"

"Ten nanokliks, ninjabot."

His seriousness was not to be doubted: coolant poured into the ninjabot's innards to account for his rapid rise in temperature. Prowl's processor raced, conflicted. It was a mildly populated area, but the chances of being caught in someone's backyard—

"Six nanokliks."

"Head-start?" Prowl almost whimpered, wheels catching on the mech's spikes as they rarely did as the bike struggled to dismount from his smug partner.

"Nah. I only got one'a those in me per 'bot and you just lost yours."

"But I _did not_—" Prowl began, stung at the injustice of it all.

"Get those pretty wheels turnin', kid," Lockdown drawled, giving him a lidded look. "Unless you wanna be screamin' on the side of an unpaved road."

That got him going. The only thing stronger than his interfacing drive, it seemed, was his pride—or common decency. Prowl pounced off of him and transformed before he hit the ground, wheels spinning madly and sending him rocketing off into the dirt with a grinding noise of a vexed engine. Feeling uncommonly generous (but _certainly_ not winded and warm from the previous race), Lockdown gave him five more extra nanokliks before pursuing his partner.

He played around, spooking the kid by revving his engines a bit. It was so close that it rattled the other's exhaust pipe, which earned him something that could only be classified as a blip of mortal terror, but Lockdown had no intention of winning this round. Fun as it was to tease, he really didn't like getting gravel bits caught between his plating. If getting old meant preferring a nice cool berth to a prickly dusty mound of gravel for an interface, he claimed it—besides, it was enough of a rush chasing Prowl clean up the ramp and hearing the tiny ninjabot gasp as his partner blew hot air on his back wheel.

That wasn't even mentioning the thrill as the bike leapt on him the second he transformed, all jumping spark and rattling motor and insistent kisses, nor the thought that only a model as perfect as this could make getting old this great.


	69. Another Time

A/N: This is utter crack and nothing but feel-good stuff for me :D

A little serious/fore-shadowy at the end (if/when I come back and write the secondary ending I've always had planned), but yeah.

* * *

Another Time

* * *

After so many centuries with one _very_ habit-driven mech, anyone would think that Prowl was incapable of being awed by any facet of Lockdown's personality—but it was still absolutely _astounding_ how puppy-like the old mech could be when he wanted something.

Time and again, Lockdown wandered into his chambers and wordlessly set to something utterly distracting, like insistently rubbing Prowl's excruciatingly sensitive fairings. No matter the timbre of the ninjabot's irritated rebukes, the musclecar would rumble and playfully nudge at his smaller partner in various ways, the very image of a pet obstructing the view of a datapad so they would be the center of attention. Even Bradbury, so far gone and so fondly remembered, had behaved a good sight more decently than Lockdown when he wanted to be petted.

Unfortunately, when Prowl had _work_ to do (he had begun taking programming jobs from other neutral 'bots a few decades ago, to supplement their downgraded hunt schedule), he hated the interruptions and sent the far larger mech on his way with a strict glare. If only it worked. If they had been en route for more than six solar-cycles, Prowl could expect Lockdown back within the megacycle, who wouldn't stop until he'd gotten either a conversation or an interface out of him. Anyone could guess which was more preferred.

One such solar-cycle, Lockdown had settled in Prowl's quarters and brought a gun with him to shine, so the ninjabot knew it was going to be a _long_ visit. Unnervingly like an old bonded couple, much of their limited conversation had taken a turn towards such domestic preoccupations as housecleaning and improving the ship. They would argue over whether a barnacle scraping was overdue or premature and remind each other to defrag Moot's harddrive if she had been acting stuffy (in the end, Prowl always sighed and instigated both of these chores only to have Lockdown huff and fall guiltily into line with much dental-clenching and pede-scuffing). That solar-cycle, Lockdown was uncharacteristically chatty, throwing out ideas for the workshop.

"Figure I can throw together the frame myself outta scrap but I'll have to buy the kit. Have to mod some'a the slots too, specs say it's only built for G4 ranked armory."

Prowl, with all the respect and love he could muster, couldn't care less. A deadline was approaching for an on-the-fly, high-cost, _confounding_ job he had taken and he needed complete silence to program to the best of his abilities. Unfortunately, the rumble from Lockdown's vocals was enough to make him look up every three nanokliks even if he turned off his audios. When the old mech started _humming_, the ninjabot glared furiously into his datapad, digits curled into claws on the holographic keyboard.

Then, like a switch had been flicked, Prowl suddenly calmed like a scratch covered with fresh silky wax. The entire, somewhat startling change went unnoticed by Lockdown, who was currently admiring the shine of one of his favorite stun-guns.

"A change or two around the ship would be welcome," Prowl spoke up after a moment, watching his partner out of the corner of his visual field. His vocals were expertly casual. Lockdown blinked up at him, as though surprised to see him respond, then scratched lazily at his neckspikes.

"Yeah? Like what? I was turnin' over the idea of a new chair for the bridge. Old one's gettin' too many sharp edges to file down, nearly cut a wire on it the other solar-cycle."

"Really," Prowl said pensively, blue visor tied up in the lines of coding on his data-pad. His digits tapped away, perhaps making sure he had Lockdown's full attention before he hmm-ed and tilted his helm. "I was thinking… a protoform."

The tiny room had never been quieter, even with Prowl gone a millennia earlier. Anyone could have heard a _molecule_ drop. Prowl finished another line of coding, opened a test file and ran it, frowning when it cut off halfway through. Lockdown looked up at the ninjabot, then blinked, rebooted his processor and realized he wasn't having a stasismare. Visor still down-turned, Prowl closed the test-file and continued easily:

"We are stable enough to support one. I could write the coding and you could teach it combat. Within a few dozen stellar-cycles we would have a functioning member of a team. All it requires is Sparking it, which is moderately outdated but I have researched the process: both of our Sparks are healthy and viable. We need only contact Tipper for a secondary check."

Across the room, Lockdown rose to his pedes. Carefully, he put one out. Then the other. Then another. All the while, his wide, wide optics remained locked on his seated partner, filled with a fear unmatched by anything as he carefully, with all the possible silence in his big frame, edged toward the door.

"Of course, our criminality notwithstanding, they will never let us walk in and ask for a protoform at Nexus. We don't exactly fit the criterion for a healthy family unit. We can supply the Spark, but the shell?"

The door slid shut with a gentle scrape.

"I believe we shall have to steal it," Prowl mused. "That should not be extraordinarily difficult, should it? …Lockdown?"

Prowl looked up with a mild smile to find an empty room—then smiled wider and went back to his datapad, humming along to the tap of his digits.

* * *

"Prowler, prowler! You are utterly shameless."

"Only hideously inventive," the ninjabot corrected her, smug smile betraying his modest tone as Torque fairly rolled on the floor of her ship. "He was being unbearable. It is only lamentable that I was driven to something so outrageous to fend him off."

"Sweet Primus, I'm surprised he hasn't commed me in a panic," Torque chuckled to herself, righting herself in her navigator's chair and rubbing at the crest between her optics. "Suppose he doesn't want to admit that it happened at all."

"I should think not." They eyed each other knowingly. Both of them knew Lockdown's style: if you don't speak of it, it might go away. "He has not spoken to me for two solar-cycles. I… regret it slightly. The quiet is dull."

"You never know what you have until it's cowering in the corner," she laughed, then quieted some, a bemused expression on her heart-shaped facial plating. "Still, darling—have you ever thought about one?"

"A protoform?" Prowl clarified, visor angled somewhat incredulously. Seeing her nod, he frowned and shook his helm. "Once, and only in a forgivable context. I do not believe Moot would be the correct environment to raise a Sparkling—too little opportunity for socialization and far too much uncertainty. Lockdown would view it as a hindrance."

"Well… I do know about Lockdown, you're right. He would probably crush the poor thing if it angered him. That mech has so little patience," she admitted with a tired gust of air, then looked at the small mech adoringly, chin in her servo. "But you, Prowl. You would make a beautiful teacher. Patient and kind."

She spoke so wistfully that he felt somewhat embarrassed, or at least a little melancholy. He couldn't help but instantly gather how badly she wanted—had always wanted—to be a creator, whereas the thought had barely occurred to him and was accompanied with no small amount of uncertainty, trepidation and healthy cynicism. The fact remained that Lockdown would simply not tolerate anything that couldn't defend itself and would resent anything that pulled Prowl's attention away from him. The coding job had already stirred the waters enough: a protoform would be grounds for a dissolution of their partnership.

Besides, Prowl wasn't nearly worldly enough to trust himself with a life. That was a job for others. He was content to live—and mess up, in turns—his own function and that of his partner's.

"I am flattered," he managed to say, deferring to her with a nod and a wan smile. "Another time, perhaps."

"Another time," she repeated for the thousandth time, smiling back.


	70. Just One Word

A/N: The happy/simple end.

Read no further (when/if I write the second ending), but thank you so much for reading, for giving this pairing a serious chance and for sticking with (long-winded, brutal, and often stupid) me through a **ridiculous** 70 chapters. You are amazing. I had so much fun and so much worry making this fic a reality, and learned so much in the process. Thanks for putting up with my mistakes and victories alike.

And hey: ninja-bike and pirate-musclecar love for forever. Hearts!

* * *

Just One Word

* * *

It had been the longest solar-cycle to date.

Lockdown sat against the wall nearest to his shop, kneading the tired dermaplating around his optics. His creaking hunch said it all: his systems were run so dry, the wall was the only thing keeping him from pitching over and shutting down into a scratched, steaming pile of spare parts.

Details weren't necessary: they had been active for approximately 74.379 megacycles, under insane physical duress, and had bagged their captive only half a megacycle (.5 of that slagging 74.379) earlier.

Prowl had gotten off easier than himself since their mark had taken the subterranean route that Lockdown was covering, but the big mech didn't have the energy left to resent it. They had barely managed to drag their sorry afts back to the ship in one piece and he craved oblivion so badly he could taste it—which was why his head kept dipping, optics flickering—but he had to wait up for the transaction approval. Payment.

Lockdown peered around. The world was a dull and ugly thing, colored by his flat grey exhaustion. At this point, distractions were both welcome and maddening. It was a welcome thing that Prowl was situated in front of him, polishing himself absently, because that meant movement, activity. Something for his optics to follow. Conversely, it was maddening due to its enthralling rhythm: soothing loops and soft swirls, predictable and soundless. Watching it nearly lulled him into sweet, weightless stasis.

Not only that, his partner had reached that one center spot on his tank that he never could reach, and seeing him fuss with it, cycle after cycle, annoyed the Pit out of him.

Prowl flinched as the bounty hunter's heavy arm bumped into him like a iron balloon gone astray, own optics losing resolution with exhaustion. Lockdown flexed his digits and grunted before snagging the polishing cloth from the other mech and very clumsily running it over Prowl's tank. He had to try a few times before the cloth didn't skid off in an odd direction; his wide, sleepy frown indicated his level of concentration, but, through dedication and hard work, the accomplished, half-dead bounty hunter had the cloth moving in circles over almost-exactly the right spot. Prowl, quieted through more than just his need for recharge, sat very still and let himself be… buffed.

At first, all went according to not-plan. The movement stimulated him. Then, once he got the hang of it, he locked into the motion, and pushing through the glossy round-round-round motion was even more soothing than watching it.

He was rubbing himself into recharge—him and Prowl both, because if buffing was pleasant, being buffed by someone else was twice so. The battered ninjabot relaxed down to his girders, substructure slackening. The slow exchange went on for quite some time, deepening their respective stupors with a gentle hand, until Prowl realized that Lockdown had disintegrated into two-thousand-plus pounds of deadness against his back, core emitting nothing but a paper-thin hum.

The ninjabot looked over his shoulder and smiled at the swaying mech, servo frozen on his tank. Prowl stopped him at the wrist, then tugged the cloth free and thanked him almost shyly. Lockdown huffed dumbly, rattled his loosely-bolted head and swayed even more ponderously than before. Prowl smiled again, then rose to his pedes with heavy, resigned motions.

"Rest," Prowl told his partner, one servo on the other's shoulder-plating. "I will wait for the transfer."

Lockdown didn't even have the energy to look at him as appraisingly as the reciprocal kindness deserved, but simply fell to the side. He hit the floor with a clank as dull as his optics, the last bit of air he held in whooshing out of his top vents; Prowl heard the lusty moan of his systems shutting down and went to sit in the bounty hunter's chair until their transaction was completed.

Lockdown never would have lasted. Delayed by circumstantial bothers he was all too eager to whine about, their contractor appeared a full megacycle later, wringing his clammy appendages and reeking of all the physical signs of a price back-down. Prowl pushed through it and secured their agreed-on payment in a tight-lipped, brutal way that would have made his partner proud, but the ninjabot felt nothing but tender hollowness after the screen flickered out.

It felt like he had been gutted with an abrasive knife and left to feel the sting of exhaustion on every contour of his healable-by-darkness insides. He vented some air, rising up and starting for his room.

His partner lay in the way. The gigantic mech had not moved from his initial (ridiculously open-mouthed) sprawl, and, looking at him with his own clouded optics, Prowl suddenly didn't have the Spark to walk all the way to his own chambers. The bridge was as fine a place to recharge as any. Padding over, the ninjabot lowered himself to the floor with many a creak and cringe.

Blearily, running off of nothing but backup coding and a few glimmers of energon, he scooted closer to the other mech, then decisively nudged Lockdown's flung-out arm up and slipped under it. His scraped-out center needed the weight of his warm, quietly-churning partner over his tender chassis. Prowl himself needed some sort of hold, possibly to keep him from falling too far into recharge.

The movement caused his partner to boot up for a split klik. Stiffening suddenly, Lockdown grunted, then tested the new position of his arm; when he found a freshly-buffed, soft-edged 'bot tucked under it, he made another vague sound then pressed Prowl close for a sleepy moment. He was too defenseless to deny their bond or the comfort he gained from moving his legs behind Prowl's—and there they lay, kliks from oblivion, and simply aspirated in tandem. Felt each other in all their scraped and scuffed-up parts.

Much had changed, through their stellar-cycles together. For as much as had changed, twice as much had gone unsaid. They were not ones to track their progress as a personal narrative, jotting down events to remember or embellish with prickly mostly-fictional details. They lived and progressed, wordless, without celebration. It was simply their way. Actions reigned supreme over words and tender admittance was as much a sin as it was an inconvenience, but what they did not say, they lived instead.

One thing that Prowl had never told his partner was how utterly and completely he loved the other mech. How dearly he was devoted to Lockdown, frame and Spark. He never told the other because there was no need, not when the evidence of their bond was in every interaction, giving them a glowing honey base to work from. No matter how rare, each found odd, coy ways of letting the other know: I treasure you above all else.

To anyone else, such an exchange may have looked like an insult or a flippant bit of teasing or a dry glance. To them, in their own complex non-language, it was as significant as a close, twisting kiss.

It had been a battle, of course. Much like everything else with the older mech, conflict was the deciding factor. As thick and headstrong as the bounty hunter could be, his ego and solitary stance simply couldn't hold up against the press of intimate millennia and the pull of a Spark that loved him as deeply as his tiny partner did. Dominated by a mech half his size, Lockdown bowed; after 23,742 stellar-cycles with him, Prowl knew that Lockdown knew. Prowl knew, more than that, that his partner felt the same way, and rare affirmation came that very moment they lay down together, each nursing the others soft hurts before blackness.

"Kid?"

Prowl hmm-ed sleepily, shifting only slightly and unaware of the conflicted expression on the older mech's face. Lockdown's huge servo slid over his front until he found the bike's tiny one, then laced their digits, face pressed into his partner's neck as though his scent alone kept him grounded. His old Spark pulsed. Prowl's pulsed back, warm and giving and loving, and Lockdown smiled into his partner's plating as though he had finally found his place, in the stars and his ship and with this mech.

"Nothin', darlin'. Nothin'."

Prowl tightened his servo and faded into recharge with a smile, because it was all his lover ever needed to say with his Spark saying everything for him.


End file.
